How to Migrate from a Monolithic to Composable CMS
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TL;DR
Migrating from a monolithic to a composable CMS means decomposing your all-in-one platform into best-of-breed services: a headless CMS for content, a separate frontend framework for presentation, and dedicated services for search, commerce, personalization, and analytics. Start by identifying which monolith capabilities to replace with specialized tools, migrate content to your headless CMS first, rebuild the frontend with a modern framework, and integrate services via APIs. This is typically a 6–18 month journey for enterprise sites.
Key Takeaways
- Map every monolith capability to a composable service before starting migration
- Migrate content first — the CMS is the foundation of the composable stack
- Rebuild the frontend with a modern framework like Next.js, Nuxt, or Astro
- Use a phased "strangler fig" approach to migrate incrementally rather than all at once