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Headless and composable

Headless CMS migration

Move your content to a headless or composable architecture without losing your visual editor, your SEO or your release cadence. We migrate to Contentful, Contentstack, Sanity, Strapi, Magnolia headless and bespoke setups on Next.js or Nuxt.

Talk to our migration teamSee Migration Accelerator

When headless is the right call

Headless solves real problems. It also creates new ones. We will say no to a headless migration if your team would be better off on a hybrid platform.

Multi-channel delivery

Web, mobile, kiosk, partner API, voice assistant, AI agent surface. When more than one channel consumes the same content, headless pays for itself.

Frontend choice

Your engineering team picks the stack: Next.js, Nuxt, Astro, Remix, native iOS, Android. Authoring and delivery decoupled cleanly.

Atomic content reuse

Blocks, products, people and stories become primary citizens. Compositions reference them. You stop copy-pasting content between pages or sites.

If you have one website, one team and authors who want visual editing without engineering, a hybrid platform like Magnolia is usually a better fit. We will tell you when that is the case.

What a noice headless migration delivers

A new content model that works across channels, a delivery architecture that ships fast, and a migration plan that does not break SEO or authoring.

Content model design

We design the content model from the consuming surfaces back. Atomic content, normalised relationships, sensible field-level reuse. No accidental page-shaped CMS.

AI-assisted content move

Migration Accelerator captures the source, infers shape, and writes content via the target platform's Content Management API. Authors approve in batches.

Delivery architecture

Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify or a self-managed Kubernetes setup with a CDN in front. SSR or SSG or hybrid. Edge personalisation when it earns its keep.

Visual editing parity

Authors keep visual editing through Contentful Compose, Contentstack Live Preview, Sanity Visual Editing, Storyblok Visual Editor or Magnolia SPA Editor.

SEO continuity guaranteed

Server-rendered HTML, 301 redirect map for every retired URL, structured data parity, Search Console plus GA4 monitoring through the warm-up window.

Editorial onboarding

Two short workshops and embedded support during the first content-load sprint. Authors are productive on the new platform within a day.

Five-stage headless migration

Twelve to twenty-two weeks for a typical Australian mid-market estate. Each stage is priced during discovery; you see the budget envelope before you commit.

1

Discovery and target selection

Two to four weeks. Channel inventory, content audit, integration map, frontend stack decision and a sized roadmap. You receive a target-platform recommendation backed by a five-year TCO model.

2

Content model and delivery design

Normalised content model, API contracts, frontend architecture and the hosting target. Editorial and engineering both review and approve.

3

Build target platform and frontend

Iterative sprints. Headless CMS configuration, frontend build, integrations, search, personalisation, DevOps. Fortnightly demos against a live environment.

4

AI-assisted content migration

Migration Accelerator writes content into the target via its Management API. Editorial approves in batches. We track coverage and authoring readiness daily.

5

Cutover and managed run

DNS warm-up, rollback plan and managed run-out of the old stack. The build team stays on under managed support, so platform context does not vanish at go-live.

See it in action

MM Plastics / Dotmar case study
Multi-siteManaged Services

MM Plastics / Dotmar

Multi-brand, multi-region digital platform at scale

A Magnolia DXP platform designed for multi-brand, multi-region rollout with long-term support.

Read case study

Headless CMS migration: FAQ

The questions Australian and New Zealand teams ask us most often about moving to headless.

Headless is the right answer when you have more than one channel (web, mobile, kiosk, agent, smart speaker), when content is reused across product surfaces, when your engineering team wants frontend choice, or when authoring needs to be globally distributed with strong API performance. Headless is the wrong answer when you have one website, one team, and content authors who want visual editing without engineering involvement. Visual editing on a hybrid platform is usually a better fit there.

A traditional CMS owns both authoring and delivery (think classic WordPress). A pure headless CMS owns authoring and exposes content over an API, leaving delivery to a downstream frontend. A hybrid platform like Magnolia or Drupal does both: it can render server-side for the marketing site, expose APIs for mobile and partner channels, and offer a visual editor on top. Hybrid is the most common landing spot for Australian enterprises that need both.

Contentful, Contentstack, Sanity, Strapi, Storyblok, Hygraph, Prismic, Builder.io, and the headless mode of Magnolia and Drupal. Choice depends on team skills, integration requirements, content modelling complexity, AI authoring features, and budget. Discovery decides the target; we are not paid by any of them.

We work to our 2026 rate card (AUD 165 to AUD 275 per hour or AUD 1,320 to AUD 2,200 per day, ex GST). Most Australian headless migrations sit between AUD 180k and AUD 850k excluding GST and target-platform subscription fees. The wide range reflects whether you have an existing frontend to keep, a new frontend to build, and how much content modelling work the migration includes. We share an itemised range at the end of a one-hour scoping call.

For a typical mid-market migration (a single brand, one to three locales, 500 to 2,000 pages), allow twelve to twenty-two weeks end to end. The biggest variable is whether you are also rebuilding the frontend at the same time. Co-running the migration with a Next.js or Nuxt rebuild adds six to ten weeks but is often the cleanest path.

We start from the surfaces that consume the content (web, mobile, agent prompt, partner API) and work back to a normalised content model that serves all of them. Atomic pieces (block, asset, person, product) become the source. Compositions and pages reference them. We resist re-creating page-shaped models in a headless CMS because that locks you back into a single-channel mindset.

Migration Accelerator crawls the source CMS, infers content shape, and writes pages or content items into the headless target through its Content Delivery API or Management API. For Contentful, Contentstack, Sanity, Strapi and Magnolia headless we have ready connectors. For less common targets we build a custom writer during the engagement.

A headless setup separates content from delivery, so delivery becomes its own architecture decision. We typically use Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify or a self-managed Kubernetes setup with a CDN in front. Image optimisation, ISR or on-demand rebuilds, edge personalisation and PSI 100 scores are all in scope. The delivery design is part of the migration plan.

Not if the frontend is built right. A well-built headless frontend with server-side rendering, static generation or hybrid rendering matches or beats traditional CMS SEO. We make SEO continuity a release blocker: 301 redirect map, server-rendered HTML, structured data parity, Search Console plus GA4 monitoring through the warm-up window.

Not necessarily. Most modern headless CMSs offer visual editing or preview against your live frontend (Contentful Compose, Contentstack Live Preview, Sanity Visual Editing, Storyblok Visual Editor, Magnolia Visual SPA Editor). Authors get preview parity if we design for it. We always do.

Ready to scope a headless migration?

A one-hour scoping call gets you a sized roadmap, a five-year TCO model and a target-platform recommendation backed by the engineers who will deliver it.

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