When we designed PressFixer, headless CMS was the obvious technical choice. It's what developers recommend. It's what agencies are building. It solves the WordPress problem — sort of.
We chose not to go that direction. Not because headless is bad. Because for the clients we serve, it trades one form of dependency for another. And dependency is exactly what we're trying to eliminate.
Here's the comparison we wish someone had written for us.
What Headless CMS Actually Is
A headless CMS separates the content management layer from the presentation layer. You edit content in a dashboard — Contentful, Sanity, Prismic, and Storyblok are the main players. A frontend framework (Next.js, Astro, Gatsby) fetches that content via API and renders it as a website.
The result is a fast, modern site that isn't running PHP or querying a database on every page load. It solves the performance and security problems that make WordPress painful. On those two fronts, headless genuinely delivers.
The problems show up when you look at cost, ownership, and ongoing complexity.
Where Headless CMS Genuinely Wins
Before the honest criticism: headless CMS is the right choice for specific situations, and it's worth saying so clearly.
If you have a content team of three or more editors publishing daily, a structured CMS dashboard is genuinely better than any alternative. Editors can work in parallel. Content relationships — authors, categories, tags, related posts — are managed cleanly. Workflow approvals, content scheduling, and localisation for multiple languages are all handled properly.
If your site has complex content types — a product catalogue, a knowledge base, a publication with hundreds of articles — the schema-driven approach keeps content consistent in ways that are difficult to replicate otherwise.
If you have a developer on staff or a reliable agency on retainer, the technical overhead is manageable. The frontend can be built once and maintained incrementally.
For these organisations, headless CMS is the right tool. We are not competing for this market.
Where It Fails Small Businesses
The small business use case is different in almost every dimension.
The cost is prohibitive. Contentful's free tier caps at 25,000 API calls per month and two users. Their Team plan is $300 per month. Sanity and Prismic are comparable. Add Next.js hosting on Vercel ($20 per month minimum, more under load), the cost of a developer to build the frontend (typically $8,000–$20,000 for a proper implementation), and an ongoing retainer to maintain the framework as dependencies update — and you're spending $1,500–$3,000 per month for a site that a five-person professional services firm doesn't need to be that complicated.
The complexity never goes away. When Contentful updates their API, someone has to update the frontend code. When Next.js releases a breaking version, someone has to handle the migration. When a new content type is needed — a testimonial section, a new service page format — a developer has to update the schema. The technology choices made at build time become permanent obligations. For a solo consultant or small service business, this means the developer relationship never ends. You've replaced WordPress dependency with developer dependency.
The editing experience assumes a content team. Headless CMS dashboards are designed for structured content — defined fields, content types, required elements. Changing something outside those structures requires a developer. A business owner who wants to rearrange their homepage, add a new section, or restructure their services page cannot do that without filing a ticket and waiting. For a team publishing 30 articles a month, the structure is a feature. For a business owner updating their site twice a year, it's a cage.
The Question Nobody Asks: Who Owns the Content?
This is the part of the comparison that is almost never discussed.
With a headless CMS, your content lives in the CMS vendor's database. Contentful stores your content. Sanity stores your content. If that vendor raises prices, gets acquired, or shuts down — your content is in their system. You can export it, but your site breaks immediately when the API goes away. You have traded WordPress dependency for CMS vendor dependency. The platform has changed. The dependency has not.
With PressFixer, content lives in HTML files in a repository the client owns outright. There is no API to go down. There is no vendor relationship to manage. The files are the site. If PressFixer ceased to exist tomorrow, every client site would continue running exactly as it was, on their own Cloudflare account, from their own repository.
This is the distinction that matters most for small business owners who have already been burned by platform dependency once. The point is not to find a better platform. The point is to eliminate the platform model entirely.
The Real Cost Comparison
For a typical five-page professional services site, updated a few times per year:
| Cost Item | Headless CMS | PressFixer |
|---|---|---|
| Initial build | $12,000–$20,000 | $7,500 on average |
| CMS platform | $300/mo ($3,600/yr) | $0 |
| Hosting | $20/mo+ ($240/yr+) | $0 |
| Developer retainer | $500–$1,500/mo | $0 |
| Year one total | $27,000–$42,000+ | $7,500 |
| Year two ongoing | $10,000–$22,000+ | $990 (agent, optional) |
The headless approach costs three to four times as much in year one and ten to twenty times as much per year ongoing. For a business doing $500,000 per year in revenue, those numbers might be justifiable. For a consultant or small service firm, they are not.
Who Should Use Headless CMS
Be honest about this before making any decision. Headless CMS is the right tool if:
- You have a dedicated content team publishing frequently
- You have a developer on staff or a reliable agency relationship you plan to maintain indefinitely
- Your content requirements are genuinely complex — multiple content types, structured schemas, multi-channel publishing
- You have budget for proper implementation and ongoing maintenance
- Your content lives across multiple channels or languages
If most of those are true, headless CMS is the right tool. This is not the situation most small businesses are in.
Who Should Use PressFixer
You are the right client for PressFixer if your current WordPress site is slow, frequently hacked, or expensive to maintain — and if most of the following are also true:
- You have a brochure-style site of five to twenty pages that changes occasionally, not constantly
- You do not have a developer on staff and do not want an ongoing developer relationship
- You want to update your site in plain English without filing tickets or learning a new system
- You want to own your infrastructure outright with no vendor dependency after handover
If that description fits, headless CMS is solving the wrong problem for you. The goal isn't a better platform. The goal is to stop needing one. See how the migration works.
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