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Sanity & Strapi Frontend: Ship Content Visually
Sanity and Strapi are strong headless CMSs: structured content via API, flexible modeling, developer-friendly. What neither delivers is a finished frontend. This guide shows how to keep Sanity or Strapi as the content source and ship the storefront visually through a Frontend Management Platform (FMP).
What Sanity and Strapi deliver, and what they do not
Sanity (with GROQ plus Content Lake) and Strapi (open-source, self-hostable) deliver content via API. The presentation layer, that is the actual storefront with performance, accessibility and backend wiring, you build yourself. For content teams that means every layout change is a developer task.
The problem many teams hit today
Content is modeled cleanly, but delivery hangs on code. Marketing cannot compose pages itself, performance is its own project, and connecting to commerce backends comes as a custom integration on top.
How a Frontend Management Platform solves it
An FMP adds the frontend layer on top of Sanity or Strapi. A unified data layer normalizes the CMS API and the commerce backends, so components speak a fixed model. In Studio, marketing composes pages with live preview from reviewed components. The output is a production-ready Nuxt app, not generated builder code. Performance and accessibility are built in, EU hosting selectable.
What you gain
- New page - Sanity/Strapi without a frontend layer: developer task; With a composable frontend: hours in the editor
- Commerce wiring - Sanity/Strapi without a frontend layer: custom integration; With a composable frontend: data layer across 50+ backends
- Performance - Sanity/Strapi without a frontend layer: build it yourself; With a composable frontend: LCP 1.2s median (field data Q2 2026)
- Accessibility - Sanity/Strapi without a frontend layer: manual; With a composable frontend: WCAG 3.0 ready out of the box
FAQ
Do I have to replace Sanity or Strapi?
No. Both stay the content source. The frontend layer is added.
Does it work with self-hosted Strapi?
Yes, as long as the API is reachable. The data layer connects to it.
How long does it take?
A guided build runs under 14 days on median, depending on your content model.
Next steps
If Sanity or Strapi carries the content but the frontend hangs on code, an FMP layer is the direct move. Book a 30-minute demo and we will look at your setup.
More from the Laioutr Platform
About the author: The Laioutr Team builds the Frontend Management Platform for Composable Commerce, EU-hosted and agent-ready.
Related reading: Corporate Website on a Headless CMS: On-Brand and Fast to Ship, Magazine Website with Headless CMS and Visual Editing.