Why this stack actually holds up after a few weeks
When I decided to migrate my portfolio to Next.js and Sanity, the goal was very clear.
I wasn’t chasing a “better technology.”
I wanted a system that allows consistent publishing without fighting the tools.
After a few weeks of working with this stack, I can say this confidently:
that’s exactly what I got.
It’s not a perfect solution — but it fits the needs of a technical blog and personal branding extremely well.
What genuinely works well
The biggest improvement is the publishing workflow.
A headless CMS solves a problem that used to be hard to manage:
content and SEO live in one place.
Instead of scattering key pieces across code, configs, and components, a single content model holds:
- the post title
- meta description
- Open Graph data
- JSON-LD
- the actual article content
Once you go beyond a handful of posts, this becomes a major quality-of-life improvement.
SEO stops being accidental.
It becomes intentional.
Performance and indexing — exactly what a blog needs
The second strong point is performance and rendering strategy.
Thanks to SSR and SSG, Next.js produces HTML that’s immediately available to crawlers.
That translates directly into faster page loads and better search engine visibility.
For a blog, this isn’t a nice optimization.
It’s the baseline.
What Sanity delivers in practice
The biggest advantage of Sanity is the ability to edit content without touching code.
After the initial setup, publishing feels like using a traditional CMS —
with the key difference that the data model remains fully under the developer’s control.
It’s true that Sanity’s configuration can feel more complex than classic CMSs.
But in exchange, the content editing experience is genuinely good and the data model is extremely flexible.
Sanity works particularly well as a central content hub that can serve multiple applications.
Features you get almost out of the box
This is where the stack really starts to show its value.
Without adding extra libraries, you get access to:
- static site generation (SSG)
- incremental static regeneration
- dynamic metadata
- preview / draft mode
- slug-based blog routing
- API-driven content
- an author-friendly CMS panel
A good example is Next.js Draft Mode, which allows previewing unpublished Sanity content.
In practice, this significantly improves the editorial workflow.
What other developers are saying
Looking at community experience, a clear pattern emerges.
Next.js combined with a headless CMS has become one of the most common choices for blogs and content-driven sites, because it:
- delivers fast load times
- scales well with growing content
- cleanly separates frontend from CMS
- provides full control over UI and SEO
There are criticisms as well — most often around:
- Sanity’s configuration complexity
- the GROQ query language
- content living outside the code repository
Even then, the publishing workflow itself is usually rated very highly.
Was the migration worth the time?
Yes.
This stack gives me exactly what I needed:
- a fast blog
- an SEO-ready architecture
- frictionless publishing
- a scalable content structure
Most importantly:
publishing content is no longer a technical problem.
And for a blog, that’s what matters most.