Sanity CMS Development Agency

Sanity headless CMS

The part that decides whether a Sanity project succeeds

Sanity is a genuinely flexible platform, and that flexibility is exactly how projects go wrong.

The most common failure we are asked to repair is not a technical fault. It is a content model that was designed around the first website rather than around the business. Fields that should have been references are embedded. Content that should be reusable is locked to a single page. Editors face forty fields when they need six. Two years later, every new campaign requires a developer, which is precisely what the organisation moved to headless to avoid.

Getting this right is unglamorous work that happens before anyone writes front-end code: deciding what your content actually is, what should be reusable, what belongs in Portable Text and what belongs in structured fields, and what an editor should see when they open the studio on a Monday morning.

We do that work deliberately, because it is the difference between a CMS that is still serving you in five years and one you are quietly planning to replace.

Why We Choose Sanity

The Content Lake

Sanity holds your content in a queryable data store rather than a page hierarchy. Every piece of content is available through the API in whatever shape you need it, to any front-end, in any combination.

The benefit: publish once and use everywhere, including in channels you have not built yet. Your content is no longer trapped in the shape of your current website.

A Studio You Actually Shape

The editing interface is not a fixed product. It is built from components you configure, so we shape it around how your team works rather than making your team adapt to a vendor's idea of publishing. We also brand it, which matters when it is a client's daily workspace.

The benefit: editors get a workspace that fits their process, which is the single biggest factor in whether a CMS gets used properly after launch.

Real-Time Collaboration

Multiple people work on the same content simultaneously without locking each other out, with live previews of exactly what will be published.

The benefit: editorial teams stop queuing behind each other, and nobody publishes something they have not seen rendered.

Structured Content, Precisely Queried

Content is retrieved with GROQ, Sanity's query language, which lets us request exactly the data a page needs and nothing more. Less data over the wire means faster pages, which feeds directly into performance and carbon.

The benefit: the speed of your site is designed at the content layer, not patched at the front-end.

Sanity and Next.js

Sanity pairs particularly well with Next.js, and it is the combination behind a large share of our work. Server-side rendering means content arrives complete for search engines and visitors, incremental regeneration keeps large content estates fast without full rebuilds, and visual editing lets your team see changes in place before publishing.

We also build Sanity front-ends in Astro where the site is content-led and the priority is shipping as little code as possible.

Proof

Sanity sits behind some of our most demanding builds. The Sick Boi store, built on Shopify, Next.js and Sanity, took over 1,200 orders in the first seven minutes of a product drop and served more than 600,000 page views in 24 hours without slowing down. Our luxury jewellery Shopify Plus rebuild used the same pairing and cut the site's carbon footprint by over 65% while meeting WCAG 2.2 AA. The brightonSEO platform runs on Sanity and Next.js, serving an audience that is professionally unforgiving about website quality.

Every build is benchmarked against our Triple Win of performance, WCAG 2.2 accessibility and lower carbon, then monitored page by page after launch with SiteBeacon.

An Honest Note: When We Would Suggest Something Else

Payload CMS

Payload CMS if you want your content structures defined in code, self-hosted, with no per-seat licensing and complete ownership of the whole thing.

Contentful

Contentful if the decision is being made by the organisation rather than the project: governance across large editorial teams, localisation at genuine scale, and the certifications and contractual assurances that clear procurement.

Kohere for Standard Website Needs

A well-built theme if your site is small, your requirements are standard and your publishing needs are modest. Headless is a bigger investment and it does not pay back for everyone. Our Kohere solution exists for exactly those cases.

We build on all three platforms and have no reason to push you towards any of them.

What it Costs

Full headless builds typically land between £60,000 and £200,000, against published UK and European agency rates of £100,000 to £350,000, with senior day rates from £200 to £450. Sanity's own licensing is paid to Sanity and is generally the most economical of the three platforms we work with.

After launch, our maintenance partnerships are published openly from £750 per month, with dedicated teams from £5,500 per month.