
When Production Data Breaks a Next.js Site
Why production data breaks Next.js sites, including CMS fields, slugs, images, relations, dates, rich text, generated routes, and validation gaps.
Articles
A Content Management System (CMS) is the editorial layer many teams rely on to create, structure, and publish content across the web. Whether traditional or headless, a CMS shapes workflow, governance, content modelling, and how reliably the front‑end can deliver performant, scalable, search‑friendly experiences.
Below you will find a subset of articles from my blog specifically about CMS and related headless CMS integration. This is an area I have worked with for many years, and it has been a regular subject in my writing. There are twenty‑three articles collected together for you below.

Why production data breaks Next.js sites, including CMS fields, slugs, images, relations, dates, rich text, generated routes, and validation gaps.

A production runbook for stale CMS content in Next.js, covering webhooks, route dependencies, ISR, cache boundaries, preview, and editor trust.

A headless CMS SEO checklist covering metadata, canonicals, schema, redirects, sitemaps, preview, internal links, image fields, and publishing controls.

How to diagnose traffic loss after a WordPress to Next.js migration by checking redirects, rendered HTML, metadata, canonicals, and tracking noise.

A WordPress to Next.js migration checklist for URLs, content models, media, preview, redirects, metadata, schema, sitemaps, SEO, and launch checks.

Build a headless CMS‑powered Next.js site with content modelling, fetch layers, mapped front‑end shapes, preview, rendering choices, and scale cleanly.

Why static generation became more complex as CMS previews, ISR, cache invalidation, build queues, e‑commerce data, and platform expectations grew.

Why Gatsby and Contentful worked well together for static sites, what made the model productive, and why teams later reassessed build time and fit.

Websites have not been set‑and‑forget for a long time now, and without the technical know‑how to update a static site, CMSes are a key part of web development.

How to plan headless CMS content models around reusable content, editor workflows, front‑end rendering, SEO fields, references, and migration risk.

How Incremental Static Regeneration affects CMS publishing freshness, including rebuild timing, stale pages, previews, and editorial expectations.

Preview Mode in Next.js explained with a headless CMS, draft content workflows, preview cookies, and how editors can see unpublished pages safely.

Plan CMS preview in Gatsby workflows by setting expectations around draft content, preview builds, webhooks, deployment timing, and editor confidence.

p Tags from Contentful List ItemsOne of the quirks of rendering Rich Text from Contentful is that list items come wrapped in paragraph <p> tags. Fortunately, this is a simple one to resolve.

Render CMS rich text safely in Gatsby and React with node mapping, link handling, embeds, headings, validation, and failure‑safe fallbacks.

Contentful rich text and Gatsby work well together until code snippets enter the picture. This guide shows how to render inline and block code cleanly.

Why Gatsby and Contentful can still work well for static sites, where the pairing becomes strained and when migration pressure is worth reviewing.

getStaticProps with CMS DataUse getStaticProps with CMS data without hiding freshness, build‑time, preview and validation risks in Pages Router content workflows.