We added Sanity as our third platform in 2026, then rebuilt our own site on it. We love it, plainly: it's the platform we reach for first whenever a business is serious about its website and its brand. This is the case for it, written by people who live in it daily: the reasoning, where it wins, and what it costs.
The thirty-second version
Sanity is a headless CMS: it stores and manages your content, and a separately built frontend displays it. Editors work in a customisable editing environment called the Studio; developers build the site in whatever framework suits, and the two are connected by an API. That separation sounds like a technical detail. It's the entire point, and everything below follows from it.
Content as data, not pages
In a traditional CMS, your content lives inside pages: the words, the layout, and the design are welded together, which is why every redesign is a migration and every migration is a risk. Sanity inverts that. You design a content model, a structured description of the things your business talks about (products, services, projects, people, articles, FAQs), and content is entered as those things, not as pages. The model matches your business rather than your current design. A physio practice models practitioners, treatments, conditions, and locations. A manufacturer models products, specifications, applications, and compliance documents. Pages become one of several things assembled from that content, not the place it lives.
Three consequences follow, and they're the reasons to care. Redesigns stop being migrations: the frontend can be rebuilt entirely while the content sits untouched, which removes the most dangerous part of every future relaunch. Content becomes reusable: the same product entry can feed your website, a price list, a proposal, and a partner feed without being retyped into each. And consistency is enforced by structure rather than discipline: when a price changes, it changes once, everywhere, because there is only one of it.
The design is replaceable. The content isn't.
This is the part page-based tools get backwards. When content lives inside the design, every paragraph sits in a layout, so changing the design means touching every page, and leaving the platform means migrating everything you've ever written. The design decisions you made at launch quietly become permanent, and the cost of changing your mind grows with every page you publish. Sanity runs the other way. The content engine is the permanent asset, and the design is a layer that can be replaced: restyled, rebuilt, or redesigned outright while the content sits exactly where it is. We can change the entire design of a Sanity site over a weekend, because nothing about the content has to move. For a brand that intends to evolve, that's the whole argument: the site keeps pace with the business instead of holding it to the year it launched.
It also breaks the rebuild cycle. Most businesses pay full price for a new site every three to five years: new build, content migration, redirect risk, the lot. A Sanity build front-loads the thinking once, and every redesign after that is a new frontend on the same content: a fraction of the cost, none of the migration danger.
Where it wins
Content-heavy sites with a real publishing operation. If your site is an asset you feed weekly (articles, guides, case studies, a resource library) rather than a brochure you update yearly, structure pays compound interest. References between documents mean a change to one service description flows into every article that cites it. Editorial workflow, drafts, and scheduled publishing are native rather than bolted on.
Businesses that publish to more than one surface. A website today, a customer portal next year, in-store screens, a partner catalogue, a mobile app. With page-based tools each surface needs its own copy of the content, and they drift apart within months. With a content model there is one source, and every surface reads from it. If your three-year plan includes any second surface, this decision is cheaper to make now than to retrofit.
Businesses that take AI visibility seriously. This is the case fewest agencies make, and the one we'd underline. Answer engines lift structured, unambiguous content: clean headings, FAQs that are data rather than decoration, structured data generated from the model instead of hand-maintained. A content model gives you that by construction. Our own FAQs, article schema, and AEO surfaces are generated from the same structured content that renders the pages, which is exactly why they never contradict each other. Page builders can be made to do this. Sanity does it by default.
Why we love working in it
Some tools you tolerate. This one we look forward to opening. The Studio is code, a React app we own, so the editing experience is designed rather than accepted: each document type shows exactly the fields that matter, with validation that stops half-finished content shipping, and nothing else. Content is queried with GROQ, which returns exactly the shape a page needs in one request, so builds stay fast. Rich text is stored as portable text, structured data rather than HTML soup, which is why the same words can render on a page, feed a schema block, and be read cleanly by a machine. And because the frontend is ours to build, there is no template ceiling: the design your brand needs is the design that ships, not the nearest theme to it. We rebuilt goji.agency this year on exactly this stack, Sanity feeding a custom frontend, and everything on this site (the articles, the 107-term glossary, the book, the FAQs serving both readers and answer engines) runs on one content model. We recommend it because we live in it daily, not because it's fashionable.
Who it's for
Anyone serious about their website and their brand. That's not a dodge; it's the real qualifier. The businesses that get the most from Sanity aren't a size or an industry: they're the ones that treat the website as an asset that compounds, fed, measured, and evolved, rather than a brochure that gets replaced. A five-person firm with that mindset gets more from it than a fifty-person firm without it. If the website matters to how you win work, the platform that never locks your content to a design is the platform to own. We're not neutral here, and we're not pretending to be: we chose it for ourselves first.
What it costs
Sanity builds sit inside our Websites range, $10,000 to $50,000+, priced by scope like every build we do, because the price follows the work, not the architecture. The ownership economics tend to run lower than platform tools over time: no per-site platform subscription, commodity hosting, and a content tier most businesses never outgrow. Add the redesigns that stop being rebuilds, and over a few years a Sanity site is frequently the cheapest way to own a serious one. Where a project lands in the range depends on how much the model has to hold and how many surfaces it feeds, and we'll tell you which end you're at, and why, after one call. The rest of the case, including what a build involves, is on our Sanity build page.
If the fit is right, let's talk.
Related reading: our Sanity agency service and the full headless CMS guide.
FAQ
What is Sanity CMS?
Sanity is a headless CMS: it manages structured content and delivers it by API to a separately built frontend. Editors work in a customisable Studio; developers build the site in any framework. The separation means redesigns don't require content migrations and the same content can feed multiple surfaces.
Is Sanity better than WordPress?
For content-heavy, multi-surface, or long-lived sites, generally yes: structured content, no plugin maintenance burden, and redesigns without migrations. For a small brochure site edited occasionally, the comparison matters less and build cost matters more. The platforms solve different problems, so the business case decides, not the feature list.
How much does a Sanity website cost?
Sanity builds sit in our Websites range of $10,000 to $50,000+, priced by scope like our platform builds. Ongoing costs typically run lower than platform tools: no per-site subscription, commodity hosting, and redesigns that reuse the content instead of rebuilding the site.
Do I need a developer to edit content in Sanity?
No. Editors work in the Studio, a purpose-built editing environment with only the fields that matter for each content type. Developers are needed to change the design or the content model, not to publish content.