What is a Headless CMS and How to Source Content from One

A headless CMS is content management software that enables writers to produce and organize content, while providing developers with structured data that can be displayed using a separate system on the frontend of a website or app.

A traditional, monolithic CMS is responsible for both the backend management of content, and serving that content to end users. In contrast, a headless CMS is decoupled from frontend concerns, which frees developers to build rich experiences for end users, using the best technology available.

Many content management systems (CMS) now support a “headless” or “decoupled” mode, which is perfect for Gatsby sites.

Through use of source plugins, Gatsby has support for dozens of headless CMS options, allowing your content team the comfort and familiarity of its preferred admin interface, and your development team the improved developer experience and performance gains of using Gatsby, GraphQL, and React to build the frontend.

The guides in this section will walk through the process of setting up content sourcing from some of the most popular headless CMSes in use today.

For integrating your site with a headless CMS:

Try it on Gatsby Cloud!

Here are more resources for guides, plugins, and starters for CMS systems you can connect to:

CMSGuidesPlugin DocsOfficial Starter
Contentfulguidedocsstarter
NetlifyCMSguidedocsstarter
WordPressguidedocs
Prismicguidedocs
Strapiguidedocs
DatoCMSguidedocsstarter
Sanityguidedocs
Drupalguidedocs
Shopifydocs
Cosmicguidedocsstarters
Contentstackguidedocsstarter
ButterCMSguidedocsstarter
Ghostguidedocsstarter
Kentico Kontentguidedocsstarter
Directusdocs
GraphCMSguidedocsstarter
Storyblokguidedocsstarter
Cockpitdocs
CraftCMSdocs
Agility CMSguidedocsstarter
Forestryguide
Gentics Meshguide
Seams-CMSguide
Builder.ioguidedocsstarter
Flotiqguidedocsstarter
Tinaguidedocs

How to add new guides to this section

If you don’t see your preferred CMS in this list, you can write a new guide yourself or open an issue to request it.

You can also write your own source plugin to integrate Gatsby with a CMS that is not in the list.