Who uses headless CMS? 15 companies that ditched WordPress

WordPress powers 43% of the web. It is the default choice for marketing sites, blogs, and content platforms. But look at the companies growing fastest - Nike, Spotify, Figma, Vercel - and you will find something different. They run headless.

Not because headless is trendy. Because their content teams were drowning in developer tickets, their pages loaded in 3+ seconds, and their architecture could not serve content to mobile apps, email systems, and web properties from one source.

And the shift is accelerating. WordPress's CMS market share dropped from 65.2% in January 2022 to under 61% by late 2025 - the first sustained decline since 2011. Figma acquired open-source CMS Payload in June 2025, signaling that design-to-code platforms see headless CMS as core infrastructure. The headless CMS market itself is projected to grow from $974 million in 2025 to over $7 billion by 2035.

This article covers 15 companies using headless CMS in production, why they made the switch, and how to know if it makes sense for your business. At RaftLabs, we build headless CMS architectures with Next.js and platforms like Sanity, Contentful, and Strapi - so we have seen both the wins and the honest limits of this approach.

What makes a CMS headless

A traditional CMS like WordPress is "coupled" - it manages your content and controls how that content is displayed. The database, the admin panel, the theme, and the rendered page are all one system. Change one part and you risk breaking another.

A headless CMS separates these concerns. The CMS handles content storage, editing, and workflows. A separate frontend application - typically built with Next.js or Astro - handles presentation. The two communicate through APIs.

The "headless" label means the CMS has no "head" - no built-in presentation layer. Content goes where you send it.

Google's mobile performance research found that 53% of mobile site visitors abandon pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load. For WordPress sites that average 2-5 second load times, that's a significant portion of every mobile campaign landing silently on a slow page.

15 companies using headless CMS in production

Enterprise

1. Nike runs its global marketing presence on a headless architecture with Contentful powering content and Next.js rendering the frontend. With campaigns launching across dozens of markets simultaneously, they needed a content infrastructure that could handle localized content at volume without developers bottlenecking every regional launch.

2. Spotify's marketing and editorial pages run on a headless stack separate from their core application. Their editorial team publishes playlist stories, artist features, and campaign pages independently. The same content serves their web experience and feeds their mobile app's discovery features.

3. Netflix uses a headless content architecture for their marketing and help center sites. Content updates - pricing changes, plan descriptions, regional availability - deploy globally without touching the codebase. When you serve 200+ million subscribers across 190 countries, content changes cannot wait for a deploy cycle.

4. Twitch moved its marketing and creator resources to a headless architecture. Their content team publishes creator guides, event pages, and partnership information without waiting for engineering sprints. The decoupled frontend lets them run performance experiments on page layouts without risking content delivery.

5. Peloton's marketing site runs headless to handle the pace of their content marketing. Class schedules, instructor profiles, challenge pages, and promotional landing pages all publish through a CMS that their marketing and content teams control directly.

SaaS and tech

1. Figma runs its marketing site on Sanity with a Next.js frontend. Their design and content teams build and publish pages using structured content models, including reusable blocks for feature sections, testimonial cards, and comparison tables that maintain brand consistency across hundreds of pages. In June 2025, Figma acquired Payload CMS, an open-source TypeScript-native CMS, signaling that design-to-code convergence requires a content layer built for developers.

2. Notion's marketing site uses a headless architecture that mirrors their product philosophy: structured, flexible, composable. Their content team builds landing pages from modular content blocks without touching code, while the engineering team iterates on the frontend independently.

3. Vercel runs vercel.com on Sanity CMS with Next.js. The company that built the framework chose a headless CMS over WordPress. Their documentation, blog, and marketing pages all pull from structured content.

4. Linear uses Sanity for their marketing site. Their changelog, blog, and feature pages publish through structured content models. For a company known for speed and polish in their product, they hold their content publishing to the same standard.

5. HashiCorp runs multiple product sites (Terraform, Vault, Consul) on a headless architecture. Shared content components serve all product lines while each maintains its own brand identity. One content model, multiple frontends.

Mid-market

1. Puma's marketing and campaign sites run headless to support the pace of seasonal launches. Campaign pages go live in hours, not weeks. Regional marketing teams publish localized content without waiting for a central development team.

2. Chick-fil-A moved their digital presence to a headless CMS to manage menu information, location pages, and promotional content across web and mobile simultaneously. One content update serves every channel.

3. Porsche uses a headless architecture for their configurator and model marketing pages. Rich media experiences, including 360-degree views, configuration options, and detailed specifications, load fast because the frontend is decoupled from the content management layer.

4. National Geographic runs editorial content through a headless CMS that supports their high-volume publishing workflow. Photo essays, articles, and interactive features publish through structured content types that enforce editorial standards automatically.

5. RaftLabs practices what we build. raftlabs.com runs 180+ MDX content files on a Next.js frontend, covering 21 service pages, 17 industry pages, 65+ blog posts, and 19 case studies. Content publishes without a CMS UI because the architecture treats content as structured data. Every page loads in under a second.

Why these companies left WordPress behind

The 15 companies above did not migrate because headless was fashionable. They migrated because WordPress was actively hurting their business in measurable ways.

Performance

WordPress pages typically load in 2-5 seconds. Headless sites built with Next.js and static generation load in under 1 second. The gap is not anecdotal - according to the HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac, only 36% of WordPress sites on mobile pass Google's Core Web Vitals assessment. A Google and Deloitte study found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile load time lifts retail conversion rates by 8.4%. That means nearly two-thirds of WordPress sites are failing the basic performance standards Google uses for search rankings. Faster pages rank higher, convert better, and keep visitors on site longer.

Publishing speed

In a WordPress workflow, content changes often require developer involvement - theme edits, plugin conflicts, staging environment testing. In a headless architecture, the content team works in the CMS while the frontend team works on the application. Neither blocks the other. Marketing teams publish landing pages in hours instead of days.

Multi-channel delivery

WordPress serves one channel: the web. A headless CMS serves content through APIs, meaning the same content can power your website, mobile app, email templates, digital signage, and any future channel - from a single source of truth. Companies like Chick-fil-A and Spotify use this to keep content consistent across web and mobile without duplicating work.

Developer experience

WordPress themes are built with PHP, a language most modern frontend developers do not prefer. Headless architecture lets engineering teams use React, Next.js, and TypeScript - the same tools they use for product development. Recruiting is easier, codebases are more maintainable, and the frontend and backend can evolve independently.

SEO control

WordPress SEO depends heavily on plugins like Yoast, which add overhead and sometimes conflict with themes. Headless architectures give you direct control over meta tags, structured data, sitemaps, and page rendering - built into the application rather than bolted on as a plugin. At RaftLabs, we build SEO infrastructure into every headless CMS project from Phase 1.

Security

In 2024, 97% of new security vulnerabilities in the WordPress plugin space came from plugins. Every plugin you install expands your attack surface. Headless architectures shrink it dramatically - the frontend is static HTML served from a CDN, and the CMS backend is an API with no public-facing attack surface for theme exploits or plugin vulnerabilities.

Why 2025-2026 is the tipping point

Three things happened in 2024-2025 that moved headless CMS from "interesting alternative" to "serious default" for content-heavy businesses.

The WordPress governance crisis broke trust in September 2024 when co-founder Matt Mullenweg publicly attacked WP Engine, calling them a "cancer to WordPress." Contributor accounts were deactivated, community leaders were banned for discussing governance reform, and in January 2025 Automattic cut its weekly open-source contributions from nearly 4,000 hours to just 45. For businesses that depend on WordPress, the governance risk is no longer theoretical.

Figma acquired Payload CMS in June 2025. Payload is an open-source TypeScript-native headless CMS, and the acquisition signals that the design-to-code pipeline now requires a structured content layer. Payload's downloads surpassed Strapi by October 2025, and companies including Apple, NASA, and OpenAI are already using it.

AI changed what "content" means. Large language models and AI agents need structured, typed content, not HTML blobs with shortcodes. Headless CMS platforms treat content as programmable data with schemas, relationships, and metadata. As AI-driven search (Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT search) grows, structured content is becoming an SEO requirement, not just an engineering preference.

When a headless CMS is overkill

Headless CMS is not the right choice for every project. Honesty about its limits matters more than hype. Brochure sites under 10 pages do not need a decoupled architecture. If your site is a homepage, about page, services page, and contact form that updates twice a year, WordPress or a static site generator is simpler and cheaper. The content velocity advantage only matters when you are actually publishing frequently.

Tight budgets with no frontend engineering are a real barrier. A headless CMS requires a frontend application, React or Next.js development, hosting on a platform like Vercel, and a team that can maintain both layers. If your total budget is under $10K and you have no engineering team, WordPress is still practical.

Content that is not a bottleneck does not need fixing. If your team publishes once a month and the current system works fine, migrating to headless solves a problem you do not have. The ROI comes from high publishing velocity, where developer dependency costs real time and money.

Solo content creators are better served by WordPress's all-in-one model. Hosting, editing, themes, and plugins in one place is genuinely easier than a decoupled setup that a solo operator does not need.

How to know if your business needs a headless CMS

A Forrester Marketing Survey found that 69% of global B2C decision-makers increased their investment in content management technology in 2024 - up from 59% in 2023. The accelerant isn't just performance: it's publishing velocity. Teams that can ship landing pages, campaign content, and product updates without developer tickets move faster than those that can't.

If three or more of these describe your current situation, headless CMS will likely pay for itself within 6 months:

• Your content team files developer tickets for text changes, new pages, or campaign landing pages

• Your site loads in over 2 seconds and you have tried caching plugins without lasting improvement

• You publish content weekly or more frequently and the current workflow slows you down

• You need the same content to appear on your website, mobile app, or other channels

• You are spending significant time managing WordPress plugin updates, security patches, and compatibility issues

• Your marketing team cannot A/B test landing page variations without engineering support

• You plan to scale content production - more pages, more authors, more frequent updates - in the next 12 months

If only one or two apply, the migration cost probably is not justified yet. Revisit when content operations become a genuine bottleneck.

The bottom line

The companies in this list - Nike, Spotify, Figma, Linear, Vercel - did not choose headless CMS because it was technically interesting. They chose it because their content operations were too slow, their pages were too heavy, and their architecture could not scale to the publishing velocity their business needed.

The question is not whether headless CMS is better than WordPress in the abstract. It is whether your business publishes enough content, across enough channels, at enough speed that the current system is actively costing you time and money.

If it is, the companies above have already proven the path works.

Evaluating whether headless CMS makes sense for your business? RaftLabs builds headless CMS websites with Next.js and Sanity, Contentful, or Strapi, optimized for content velocity, SEO, and non-technical publishing. Let's discuss your current setup.