There's a misunderstanding I've heard come up pretty often recently in the industry — some think Headless architecture is complicated, and for that reason should be avoided to reduce complexity and cost. As with most things, it depends, but Headless is not inherently more complicated than a Modular Monolith. I'll go deeper on that, along with some history and context brands should be considering, in an upcoming post.
For today, I wanted to share fresh proof on a basic test scale, and how I took my simple Liquid-based personal website and rebuilt it as a new Headless one using Sanity — in around an hour (let's call it 60 Minutes Flat).
I gave myself three requirements going in:
- Upgrade the personal site to a Headless architecture
- Do it as fast and simply as possible
- Make it scalable — modifications and content operations should be efficient from day one
With those guardrails in place, I opened VSCode and created a new Sanity project from one of their starter templates using a single line of code:
npm create sanity@latest -- --template sanity-io/sanity-template-nextjs-clean
Followed the template instructions, deployed to Vercel, and had a live site in about 20 minutes. From there I made code changes to match my previous branding and design, coded in a contact form integrated with the Resend API so form submissions land directly in my email, let the DNS populate, and was fully up and running in around an hour total.
Is it perfect? No. Is there more to build? Absolutely. But it's a solid starting point — and now I have a site running Next.js and React, hosted on Vercel, styled with Tailwind CSS, and powered by Sanity as the content platform. From here I can continue to develop it as needed, with a place to publish posts to share with the community, and manage structured content efficiently through the Sanity Studio.
Hence: Headless != complicated (more on that soon).