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Web Development4 February 20267 min read

The case for headless — without the hype

Headless is brilliant for some sites and a distraction for others. Here's the honest framework we use to decide.

Headless commerce and headless CMS have been the loudest conversation in web for three years. They're powerful — and frequently the wrong tool.

When headless earns its keep

Multi-market e-commerce. Custom commerce experiences (configurators, B2B portals). Content models that traditional CMSes can't express. Performance budgets that demand edge rendering.

When it's a distraction

A ten-page marketing site. A team without front-end engineering capacity. A roadmap that needs to ship next quarter, not next year.

Our default

Most sites we build sit on Next.js with a managed headless CMS (Sanity, Contentful or Storyblok depending on the team). Heavy commerce sits on a headless commerce layer (Shopify Hydrogen or a custom backend) — but only when the trade-off is worth it.

Written by The Everyn team.