Content that lasts: Scaling beyond your frontend (ssr)

Written by Pieter Brinkman

Missing Image!

Evolving tech stacks and front end frameworks are inevitable for engineering teams managing digital experiences. However, the underlying content foundation should remain stable, adaptable, and future-proof.

At Sanity, we often see agencies and enterprises rebuilding their websites every few years—adapting to new needs, refining brand experiences, and modernizing their tech stacks. Yet, across those changes, our most forward-thinking customers never need to change their CMS for these reasons. Why? Because they chose a content-first, structured approach that adapts with them.

A CMS that moves with you—not against you

One of our agency partners, Bejamas, has rebuilt its website multiple times since 2019, transitioning from Gatsby to Next.js and now to Remix. But through all these front end shifts, Sanity has remained its trusted content foundation.

Before Sanity, their team struggled with:

• Markdown files and Git-based content management are efficient for developers but challenging as the team grows.
• Monolithic CMS limitations, where rigid structures slowed iteration and added maintenance overhead.
• Tightly coupled content and presentation, making migrations complex and restricting flexibility.
• Limited real-time collaboration makes it difficult for teams to work simultaneously on content and requires inefficient workflows.

They needed a content system that enabled structured content, prioritized developer efficiency, and could evolve alongside their digital strategy. That’s exactly what they found in Sanity.

How Sanity future-proofs digital experiences

Sanity’s approach to content operations provides three key advantages for agencies and enterprises looking to scale without re-platforming:

1. Structured content architecture and Content Lake: scalable, flexible, and future-ready

A common challenge with legacy CMS platforms and DXPs is the close connection of content with presentation logic. Sanity decouples content from front-end dependencies, ensuring the content remains stable and reusable no matter how the front end evolves.

Sanity’s architecture is centered around its Content Lake, a fully managed, cloud-based data store that separates content storage from presentation and editing interfaces. Content Lake treats content as structured, queryable data by default. This approach enables:

• Reusable content across multiple surfaces and channels.
• Flexible content querying with GROQ, allowing developers to retrieve exactly the data they need—without the constraints of rigid GraphQL schemas or over-fetching with REST APIs.
• Seamless integration with various front-end frameworks and data sources allows content to flow effortlessly without predefined schemas.
• A customizable editing experience with Sanity Studio, where content models are configured without imposing rigid structures on the Content Lake.
• Future-proofing for digital experiences, empowering teams to upgrade or rebuild frontends without extensive re-platforming, as the content remains stored as scalable, queryable JSON documents.

“We always kept the pieces of content—blog posts, team members, all our Knowledge Hub content—structured. If we changed the frontend, we could keep the same queries or modify them without a complete overhaul.”
—Thom Krupa, CTO & Co-founder Bejamas

2. Developer-first control with full content ownership

Unlike many CMS platforms that lock customers into predefined structures, Sanity ensures complete content ownership. Your content models are defined in code and pushed to GitHub, providing access to all-powerful Git features such as branching and version control.

During their last website redesign, Bejamas leveraged Sanity’s:

• Schema as code—content models in GitHub give access to versioning, branching, and collaboration workflows.
• Schema versioning in Git—ensuring content structures evolved alongside their codebase.
• Integration with favorite coding tools—allowing developers to build and maintain data models using their preferred workflows and frameworks.

3. Real-time collaboration and editorial efficiency

Sanity provides developer flexibility and enhances the editorial experience, ensuring content teams can work efficiently and effectively. Sanity’s real-time collaboration features remove the bottlenecks of traditional CMS platforms, where developers are often required for minor content updates. With Sanity Studio, teams work in parallel—reducing context-switching and accelerating content workflows.

• Real-time collaboration allows multiple editors to work on the same content simultaneously, eliminating bottlenecks and reducing dependencies on developers.
• Custom editorial workflows enable teams to define approval processes, version control, and automation, ensuring consistency and accuracy in content management.
• Instant preview and live updates empower content creators by allowing them to see changes reflected immediately before publishing.

“The ability to collaborate in real-time and customize our editorial workflows has drastically improved efficiency and reduced dependency on developers.”
—Thom Krupa, CTO & Co-founder Bejamas

Lessons from agencies who never change their CMS

As agencies and enterprises refine their digital strategies, the underlying content infrastructure must be flexible, performant, and adaptable. The teams that future-proof their digital presence recognize the following truths:

• Replatforming should be a choice, not a necessity—redesigns and migrations become easier with structured content.
• Content needs to be modeled as data—not locked into rigid templates.
• APIs drive content agility—ensuring integrations with evolving tools and frameworks.

By choosing Sanity, agencies like Bejamas and brands like PUMA, Sonos, and Figma ensure that their content operations scale alongside their business—without technical debt or unnecessary complexity.

Whether your team is considering a website rebuild, a front end migration, or expanding digital channels, your CMS should be the constant—not the bottleneck.

To see how a modern engineering team navigated multiple front end migrations while keeping their CMS intact, check out the full breakdown of their journey here.