Sanity CMS – key features, benefits and use cases

When it comes to managing and editing the content for your website, there are virtually endless options for the platform, or content management system (CMS) you can use to power it.

There are well-established options you might have heard of, such as WordPress*, Drupal, Umbraco. In the last few years, a new generation of platforms has emerged – offering improved flexibility, scalability, and performance. One of these platforms is Sanity – a “content operating system” that offers a fully customisable editing experience and treats content as data.

Let’s get into Sanity CMS, key features, benefits and use cases.

*We still use WordPress to power high-performing headless websites. Depending on your use case, it’s a powerful and solid option with many benefits.

What is Sanity CMS?

Sanity is a modern headless CMS that uses structured content, enabling you to reuse content across multiple channels. “Structured content” means breaking content into its smallest possible pieces and treating it as data – meaning it can be arranged and expressed on any web page, app, feed or product without having to manually repurpose it. “Headless” means the frontend is separated from the backend – unlike a “traditional” CMS setup where the two are linked. In fact Sanity doesn’t have a frontend at all, and a completely custom frontend can be developed and pulled from the content database (more on that shortly).

Adaptable is an official agency partner of Sanity, enabling us to offer enhanced support and services around the platform.

Sanity CMS: features and benefits

Like any web project, there are benefits and drawbacks of using any platform – it depends on which system is best suited to your needs now and in the short to mid-term. That being said, here are some key features and benefits of Sanity.

Flexible content types

As we’ve already covered, Sanity treats content as data – breaking it down into its smallest possible pieces to make it more flexible and reusable. This also enables the platform to do something called flexible content modelling. Content modelling means being able to set up different content types, and define custom relationships between them – pages, posts, products, white papers, guides and media. This can all be brought together in a customised and highly personalised editing environment.

Real-time collaborative editing

If you’ve ever tried to produce and launch a piece of content for your website, you’ll know that often the tweaking and amending process doesn’t end once you’ve perfected the copy in your Google Doc. It can often take a bit of experimenting to achieve the look you want on the live site – and it can be helpful, but not always easy, to share this with colleagues to get their feedback. Sanity supports real-time collaborative editing – meaning just like in Google Docs, users can be working in and editing a document at the same time. You’ll all be able to see any changes, who made them, etc, and be able to rollback anything when you need to.

Developer heaven

Sanity is incredibly easy to customise, as well as seamless to integrate with lots of other tools and platforms. From an engineering perspective, it offers a lot more flexibility in terms of the tech stack, enabling our team to build out your environment tailored exactly to your needs. As Sanity as a CMS offers only content management, and no frontend interface at all, there’s a completely blank state to work with. The decoupled backend enables developers to use the best available frontend framework to deliver a super-fast website that provides the experience you need it to.

Headless CMS

While other CMS platforms like WordPress can be used in a headless environment, Sanity is natively a headless CMS – offering an extra level of flexibility as well as offering improved scalability and security from the start. With headless, rather than the content being pulled from the CMS every time a request is made, a static, pre-built version of the page is served via an API in the background, enabling it to load quickly and efficiently.

Scalable with performance

The headless architecture of Sanity CMS can handle large amounts of data, content and traffic without compromising on frontend performance or the editing experience in the backend. The backend of Sanity can also be customised and scaled without the use of plugins, which while they shouldn’t impact performance when installed and utilised correctly, does mean everything is slightly more streamlined, reducing tech debt.

sanity vs WordPress

We use both Sanity and WordPress for website and digital product development – each has its own benefits and potential downsides for a particular use case. Here are some key differences between Sanity and WordPress that it’s worth knowing about.

• Inherently headless – as we’ve already mentioned, the main difference between Sanity and WordPress as CMS platforms is that it is headless out-of-the-box, only offering content management and no frontend interface at all. This can mean more of an investment in frontend development time, but it offers enhanced customisation and flexibility.
• Less familiar – more than half of the web is powered by WordPress, so many people who manage websites are very familiar and comfortable with it. Switching to Sanity might be a departure from what you’re used to, but it’s designed to be highly intuitive and easy to pick up.
• More customisable editing experiences – whether headless or in a traditional setup, there are certain aspects of the WordPress platform which are “standard” and can’t be changed. Sanity as a backend experience is more customisable. For example, when editing content, developers can change default formatting options for text from the standard “Heading 1, Heading 2, etc” to whatever will make more contextual sense to that particular user or client, e.g. “Section header, sub header”, etc.

Use cases

Utilita Energy

We worked with leading UK energy supplier Utilita Energy to create a number of user journeys that would provide effortless quotes for their boiler and renewable energy services and products. We utilised Sanity to power the funnels as digital products, integrated seamlessly with a main WordPress marketing website as well as their internal CRM to allow for a completely streamlined user experience. The CMS pulls and pushes data from their internal system to pull in live pricing, engineer availability and book in virtual appointments.

Read more ➡️

Davidson Homes

After working with US homebuilder Davidson Homes initially to successfully relaunch their website, after a number of years working in the new environment we identified the need to move to headless and a new platform. A Sanity CMS backend enabled us to create custom data structures and handle complex relationships that would support large amounts of data as well as integrations with US real estate market multiple listing services (MLS).

Read more ➡️

Key Takeaways

• Headless and flexible: Sanity is a headless CMS that treats content as data, allowing for content repurposing and highly customisable multiple frontends, making it ideal for complex, multi-channel sites.
• Real-time collaboration: Sanity supports real-time collaborative editing, enabling multiple users to edit simultaneously and streamline content creation.
• Developer-friendly and scalable: Sanity’s highly customisable backend and integration flexibility let developers build high-performance sites without relying on plugins, ensuring scalability and reduced tech debt.
• Comparison to WordPress: Unlike WordPress, Sanity is natively headless, more customisable, and suited for developers seeking a tailored, scalable solution, though it may require a learning curve for new users.

Looking to a launch a new website or digital project and wondering if Sanity might be suitable for you? Get in touch and let’s talk about your requirements.