Headless CMS

A headless CMS is a content management system that stores content and delivers it through APIs without rendering any user interface itself. The CMS owns the content; a separate frontend application decides how to display it. The term mirrors headless commerce: the "head" is the frontend, the "body" is the CMS, and the two communicate through APIs rather than living in the same codebase. A traditional CMS like WordPress couples content storage with presentation. Templates and themes render pages inside the CMS itself. A headless CMS removes the presentation layer entirely. The CMS becomes a content backend with editing tools, structured content models, and API endpoints. The frontend — a website, a mobile app, a kiosk, an in-store screen — fetches the content it needs and renders it however it wants. ## What a headless CMS is good for Headless CMS makes sense when content needs to flow to multiple channels. The same product description, marketing copy, or campaign content can power a website, a native app, a customer service tool, and a marketplace listing without being duplicated. Each channel is a separate frontend against the same content API. It also makes sense when the frontend technology is decoupled from the content workflow. A marketing team should be able to publish a landing page without waiting for a developer to template it. Modern headless CMS products like Storyblok, Contentful, and Sanity ship visual editors that let editors compose pages from pre-built blocks while developers control how those blocks render in code. ## Common headless CMS products The most widely used headless CMS products include Storyblok (Austrian, visual editor focus, popular in European ecommerce), Contentful (German, enterprise positioning, large global footprint), Sanity (Norwegian, developer-focused, strong structured content model), Strapi (open-source, self-hostable), Hygraph (formerly GraphCMS, GraphQL-first), and Contentstack (enterprise, deep MACH alignment). Each has different editor experiences, pricing models, and integration depth. ## Headless CMS in a commerce stack In ecommerce, a headless CMS typically lives alongside the commerce backend. The commerce engine (Norce, Shopware, commercetools, Shopify) owns products, pricing, inventory, and orders. The headless CMS owns everything else — landing pages, blog posts, navigation menus, campaign content, brand storytelling, help articles. The frontend reads from both and renders them as one continuous storefront. This split is what makes a headless ecommerce frontend powerful for content-heavy commerce. Brand-driven D2C merchants, B2B with complex educational content, and multi-market merchants with localized campaigns all rely on the CMS layer doing real work alongside the commerce engine. ## How Frntkey relates Frntkey ships with Storyblok bundled as the headless CMS. Every Frntkey project includes a Storyblok space configured with the Frntkey component library — hero blocks, product carousels, content sections, campaign banners, FAQ accordions, and other blocks editors compose pages from. The integration is built in. Storyblok handles content; Frntkey handles rendering; Norce or Shopware handles commerce. ## Related terms Headless architecture · Headless commerce · Composable commerce · Ecommerce frontend