Compare Strapi, Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok, and Hygraph on published pricing, free tiers, and fit for 2026 headless projects.

Optimize Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress. Implement high fetch priority preloads and cached Base64 Low-Quality Image Placeholders.

Launching Preload LCP Image - a WordPress plugin that allows you to specify the largest contentful paint image on a page.

Launching Preload LCP Image - a WordPress plugin that allows you to specify the largest contentful paint image on a page.

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For Addiction Education Society (AES), we modeled resources, stories, and core pages in Contentful so staff could update the public site without developer support. The team now publishes changes in minutes rather than days. For CrewAI, we mapped reusable page components to Contentful models, then built a separate handoff that turns published Ghost articles into Contentful drafts. Both projects used the same content management system (CMS). The useful engineering decision was where to place editorial control, rendering rules, and the final publication gate. A headless CMS stores structured content separately from the code that renders it. That separation helps only when the content model reflects what editors need to create and what engineers need to keep consistent. These projects exposed 3 questions worth answering before migrating a page: What is reusable content? Which system owns each step of publication? Which existing systems should stay in place? ## Model the things editors actually manage At AES, the main requirement was editorial independence. Staff needed to maintain information as the nonprofit's education and outreach work grew. We created Contentful models for resources, stories, and core pages. Those categories gave the team structured material to build and update pages independently, including for time-sensitive initiatives. The AES case study reports that updates which took days can now be published in minutes. CrewAI needed a different level of composition. Its previous CMS could no longer support the website it needed. We designed reusable components in Figma, including hero layouts, pricing sections, feature grids, statistics modules, and tabbed content. Each component mapped to a structured Contentful model. Marketing could assemble pages from those blocks, while developers rendered the layouts through GraphQL with strong type safety. In the CrewAI case study, the shift from individual templates to reusable sections is the mechanism behind that division of work. The model therefore served as a contract. An editor could choose and populate a supported section; engineering owned how that section rendered and how it fit with analytics, search optimization, and integrations. Contentful's reference based type system makes these relationships possible, but the types still have to be designed. A collection of loosely related entries would give editors fields to fill without giving the site a dependable composition system. That is the modeling cost we account for up front. ## Draw the migration boundary around the work AES also shows why a CMS migration does not have to mean replacing every application under a domain. Its WordPress learning system supported active educational programs. Rebuilding that system along with the marketing site would have risked downtime or lost functionality. We launched a new marketing platform using Astro and Contentful alongside the existing learning system. Public pages, articles, and donation flows were modernized while the programs continued. Visitors still had an experience under one domain, and AES retained a path to migrate more functionality later. That boundary mattered operationally. Staff gained control of public content without waiting for the learning platform to be rebuilt. The Contentful work solved a publishing problem; the surrounding architecture kept an existing program available. The project also used Contentful's pro bono program, which made the platform accessible to this qualifying nonprofit. Pricing was part of the platform decision, even though the implementation followed the same content modeling discipline as a larger site. CrewAI crossed a different boundary. We moved its site away from page specific templates toward structured sections in Contentful, but kept Ghost for article writing. Treating every existing tool as something to replace would have disrupted a workflow the editorial team already valued. The two projects suggest a practical migration exercise: list the tasks people perform in each system, then move only the tasks the new architecture is meant to improve. ## Make the publication gate explicit CrewAI's writers publish articles in Ghost. An automated workflow converts each published Ghost article into a **draft** in Contentful. It stops there deliberately. Marketing then reviews the content, adds metadata, adjusts page composition, schedules it, and publishes it to the public site. Ghost owns the writing experience; Contentful owns the website release decision. The draft state is the critical part of that integration. If the handoff went straight to public publication, the team would lose the documented review and enrichment step. If writers had to repeat their work manually in Contentful, the handoff would become another editorial bottleneck. The Contentful project page describes this pipeline as the integration point; the case study shows the specific roles on each side of it. This is a useful question for any CMS integration: does an upstream “published” event mean ready for the public website, or ready for the next team to review? In CrewAI's workflow, those are separate states. Naming them in the architecture gives both teams a clear handoff and lets each keep the tool suited to its work. ## Choose the platform with its constraints visible Contentful gave AES structured content and staff publishing control; it gave CrewAI reusable page composition and a controlled handoff from Ghost. Neither outcome came from installing a CMS alone. We had to define content types, decide which existing systems would remain, and specify the point where a draft becomes public. The platform also has costs. Its type system rewards careful modeling, and the Contentful project page notes both the budget impact and the absence of a built-in visual canvas for page building. For a small team with simple pages, that may be more structure than the work requires. For a site where several teams need to assemble pages and govern releases, the structure has a clear job. Start the architecture discussion with the editorial handoffs and the content that must be reused; they reveal whether the CMS belongs at the center, alongside another tool, or only on one part of the site.

A SaaS landing page should load its main message quickly, respond without delay, and stay still while a visitor reads or clicks. Measure the real page first, find which Core Web Vital is failing, and fix that path before running a general “speed optimization” project. ## What are the three Core Web Vitals? Google's current Web Vitals guidance defines three Core Web Vitals: * **Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)** measures loading performance. A good result is 2.5 seconds or less. * **Interaction to Next Paint (INP)** measures responsiveness. A good result is 200 milliseconds or less. * **Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)** measures visual stability. A good result is 0.1 or less. Evaluate the 75th percentile of page visits, split by mobile and desktop. A fast laptop test is useful for debugging, but it does not replace field data from real visits. ## Start with field data Open the deployed landing page in PageSpeed Insights. Check the “Discover what your real users are experiencing” section before the lab score. Google's Core Web Vitals tools workflow recommends using field data to find the pages and metrics that need attention, then using Lighthouse and browser performance tools to diagnose the cause. Ask three questions: 1. Is the failing data for this exact URL or the whole origin? 2. Does the problem affect mobile, desktop, or both? 3. Which one of LCP, INP, or CLS is outside the good range? This keeps the work tied to a user problem. It also prevents a team from shrinking every icon while the real delay comes from the server or a large hero image. ## Fix LCP: make the main content easy to find On a SaaS landing page, the LCP element is often a hero heading or image. Inspect the element reported by PageSpeed Insights or Chrome DevTools instead of guessing. If the hero image is the LCP element: * include it in the initial HTML; * avoid lazy-loading it; * serve an image close to its displayed size; * use a modern compressed format where it works; * give it high fetch priority when it is clearly the main visual. <img src="/dashboard-hero.avif" width="1200" height="675" fetchpriority="high" alt="Dashboard showing a completed weekly report" /> Do not preload every image. That makes resources compete with each other. Google's LCP optimization guide recommends making the LCP resource discoverable in the HTML and prioritizing it without taking bandwidth away from other critical files. If the LCP element is text, inspect server response time, blocking stylesheets, and web fonts. A fast image cannot repair a slow HTML response. ## Fix INP: reduce work after a click INP covers interactions across the visit. On a landing page, common problems include a pricing toggle, signup modal, chat widget, or menu that waits behind a long JavaScript task. Start by recording a slow interaction in the browser Performance panel. Look for a long task that begins near the click or key press. Then reduce the work: * load optional widgets after the main page is ready; * split large tasks so the browser can update between them; * remove JavaScript shipped for components the page does not use; * keep event handlers small; * avoid rebuilding a large part of the page for one simple interaction. A delayed pricing toggle is not only a technical score problem. It makes the visitor wonder whether the control worked. ## Fix CLS: reserve space before content arrives CLS problems often appear when a hero image, embedded demo, cookie banner, or web font changes the layout after the visitor starts reading. Give images and videos an intrinsic size or an aspect ratio: .hero-demo { aspect-ratio: 16 / 9; width: 100%; height: auto; } Reserve space for banners and embedded tools when their size is known. Avoid inserting a signup bar above content that is already visible. Google's CLS guide lists images without dimensions and dynamically injected content among the common causes of layout shifts. Test the page beyond its initial load. Some shifts happen only after a visitor accepts a cookie notice, opens a menu, or waits for a widget. ## Retest the same path After each change: 1. Run a local performance trace to confirm the intended cause changed. 2. Deploy the fix. 3. Check the live page with PageSpeed Insights. 4. Monitor field data as new visits are collected. Keep a short note with the page, metric, suspected cause, change, and result. This gives the next developer evidence instead of a vague instruction to “make the site faster.” Core Web Vitals are useful because each metric points to a different part of the first visit. Fix the failed experience the metric describes, and keep the landing page's main promise visible throughout the work. Hey I'm Uriel Bitton. I write about building in public strategies and growing startups. Subscribe for more stories on growing your audience by building in public. Join us on Buildside: the social network for founders building in public. ## Sources * web.dev: Web Vitals * web.dev: Core Web Vitals workflows with Google tools * web.dev: Optimize Largest Contentful Paint * web.dev: Optimize Cumulative Layout Shift

Self-hosted, open-source headless CMS built specifically for Astro.js with a block-based page builder.

Launching Preload LCP Image - a WordPress plugin that allows you to specify the largest contentful paint image on a page.

A single hydration mismatch on a page can tank Largest Contentful Paint from green all the way to red

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This year’s Digiday Technology Awards honor the companies embracing AI and automation tools to enhance personalized experiences, enable precise targeting and drive performance across platforms and channels. Winners are also integrating advanced e-commerce technologies and focusing on integrated measurement and analytics solutions that unveil deeper performance tracking. In the Best AI Tool category, PolyAI — […]

Launching Preload LCP Image - a WordPress plugin that allows you to specify the largest contentful paint image on a page.

Launching Preload LCP Image - a WordPress plugin that allows you to specify the largest contentful paint image on a page.

Launching Preload LCP Image - a WordPress plugin that allows you to specify the largest contentful paint image on a page.

The name change attaches a new identity to an agency history that reaches back to 2008 and now includes participation in the Drupal AI Initiative.

Launching Preload LCP Image - a WordPress plugin that allows you to specify the largest contentful paint image on a page.