Most small business websites start the same way. Someone picks a WordPress template, fills in their text, uploads a logo, and launches. It works fine for a while.

Then the business grows. They want a client portal, or product filtering, or just the ability to update content without accidentally breaking the layout. And suddenly the platform that was easy to set up is the thing in the way.

This is why I use Sanity for WebSilm's client projects.

What Sanity actually is

Sanity is a headless CMS. The part where you manage content is completely separate from what visitors see.

With WordPress, the database, admin panel, and frontend are all bundled together. That's convenient at the start and a headache later. With Sanity, content lives in a cloud database (Sanity calls it the Content Lake). The frontend is built separately in Next.js and pulls content via API.

Practical upside: the same content can feed your website, a mobile app, or an email system without copying anything. You update it once, it's current everywhere.

Where WordPress starts causing problems

WordPress runs roughly 40% of the web and there are real reasons for that. For a blog or a simple company site, it works.

The trouble starts when you want more. Better SEO — add a plugin. Faster loading — another plugin. Custom content fields — another plugin. At 20–30 plugins, updates start conflicting and page speed drops. I've taken on WordPress sites where a routine update broke the homepage. That kind of fragility is a business problem, not just a developer irritation.

Sanity doesn't need plugins for any of this. Complex data structures are handled natively. The frontend is pre-rendered static HTML on Cloudflare Pages — no database queried on every load, nothing to crash under traffic.

Where Wix and Squarespace fall short

Site builders are genuinely good for what they're designed for. A local business that needs to be findable online, up quickly, without a developer — Wix does that.

The ceiling is lower than people expect. The moment someone on your team moves a section or resizes an image, the mobile view breaks and you need a developer to fix something that shouldn't have needed fixing.

Sanity separates editing from design entirely. Editors fill in structured fields — title, description, image, price — and the code handles how it looks. The layout can't be accidentally broken because editors never touch the layout.

The editing experience is cleaner than you'd expect

Because I build the Sanity Studio interface for each specific project, there are no irrelevant settings on screen. Just the fields that matter for that business.

Multiple people can edit simultaneously without overwriting each other — it handles conflicts the way Google Docs does. For a team managing a content-heavy site, that's genuinely useful.

When Sanity is the wrong choice

Sanity requires a developer to set it up. There's no theme to click and launch. The frontend has to be built from scratch.

For a simple 5-page site that rarely changes, that overhead isn't worth it. A static HTML build or a lean WordPress setup gets there faster and cheaper. I tell clients this when it applies — there's no point selling someone a more complex build than their project needs.

Sanity makes sense for: sites that need to scale, complex content structures, teams who'll be editing regularly, and projects where performance and security can't be an afterthought.

How this looks in practice at WebSilm

Projects that go beyond a basic brochure site are built on Sanity + Next.js, hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Fast, secure, and clients can update their own content without calling me every time a price changes.

If your current site is slow, hard to update, or you've just run into the ceiling of what your platform can do, get in touch. I'll tell you honestly whether Sanity fits or whether something simpler makes more sense.

WebSilm builds websites for small businesses. Sanity + Next.js projects from €500.