How Contensis helps you manage information architecture in a headless world

In earlier articles – including our guides to headless CMS migration, structured content modelling, and future-proofing your digital estate – we looked at the benefits of switching to a headless CMS, from flexible front-end delivery to structured, reusable content. But while headless platforms give you more freedom, they also introduce new challenges – especially when it comes to managing your website's information architecture (IA).

When you go headless, you get flexibility, speed, and control over your front end. However, many teams find managing their website's IA challenging in a decoupled setup.

In a traditional CMS, page structure and hierarchy are often visual and tightly coupled to how the site looks. But in a headless setup, that structure is no longer baked into the platform – leaving many teams wondering how to maintain a consistent structure across a sprawling, multi-section site.

This presents a real challenge for organisations managing large or complex digital estates. How do you ensure your website's structure stays consistent, scalable, and understandable – not just for developers but also for content editors, governance teams, and end users?

Contensis is different. We recognise that while modern organisations communicate and engage with their customers through an increasing number of platforms, websites remain by far the important channel for most enterprise teams. Being able to repurpose your content for use across native applications, chat agents, and digital screens is only helpful if it's also easy to manage how that content is organised and presented on your website.

That's why Contensis gives you the tools to easily model, manage, and maintain your site's information architecture – without giving up the flexibility of a headless CMS.

In a traditional CMS, structure and presentation are closely linked. Editors can see how pages fit together in a visual tree, create subpages with a few clicks, and use built-in templates to determine how content is displayed. Information architecture is often enforced through the page structure itself – with navigation menus, breadcrumbs, and URL paths automatically reflecting the hierarchy.

A headless CMS works differently. Content is stored independently of how it's displayed, and the concept of a "page" becomes abstract. Editors work with content entries – often structured and modular – without necessarily seeing where or how that content will appear.

This decoupling brings enormous benefits. Your content becomes reusable, presentation-agnostic, and accessible via APIs. However, it also creates new challenges, particularly for large organisations managing complex sites across multiple teams.

• Structure becomes implicit: In most headless platforms, there's no visual tree or nested folder system to show how content fits together. Editors can lose sight of where their content lives or how it connects to other parts of the site.
• Navigation must be defined deliberately: Menus, breadcrumbs, and contextual navigation don't happen automatically. Developers need to build logic for how content is grouped and displayed – and editors need tools to understand and manage that logic in the CMS.
• Content can become fragmented: Without careful planning, structured entries can end up scattered, inconsistent, or poorly labelled. This makes it harder to maintain consistency across different parts of the site and increases the risk of orphaned content.
• Relationships and taxonomy become critical: In a headless environment, content relationships and tagging often form the backbone of your site's navigation and discovery experience. If these are poorly maintained, content becomes harder to govern – and more difficult for users to find.
• Editorial context is harder to maintain: Because content is split into modular blocks and removed from its presentation layer, editors may not understand how their content contributes to the wider structure and experience of the site. This disconnect can lead to inconsistent tone, structure, and priorities across sections.
• URL and redirect management aren't always built in: In many headless platforms, URLs are handled entirely on the front end. Editors may have no visibility of a page's final URL, and no way to define redirects during a migration or restructure. This can make maintaining consistency and SEO performance harder, especially when launching new sections or retiring old ones.

For small, simple websites, this might not be a problem. But for organisations managing hundreds or thousands of entries – often across multiple teams and departments – it's easy for things to spiral. Without tools to visualise and govern the underlying architecture, content can quickly become siloed, duplicated, or hard to navigate.

That's why IA needs to be actively managed in headless setups. And it's why Contensis includes features that make this process visible, intuitive, and maintainable – without sacrificing the flexibility of a decoupled architecture.

Contensis gives you tools to keep your IA clear, consistent, and user-friendly – starting with Site View.

Site View is Contensis' answer to the lack of visible structure in most headless CMS platforms. It provides a visual representation of your site's hierarchy – making it easy for editors to see how content is organised, understand how sections relate to one another, and manage the site's structure without relying on a developer.

You can:

• Create, rename, and move sections in a tree-like structure.
• Assign entries to specific nodes in the hierarchy to generate structured, human-readable and SEO-friendly URLs.
• Locate and edit content directly from the Site View tree.
• Automatically update breadcrumbs and menu items when the structure changes to avoid broken links.
• Preview how a section will appear before you publish changes.
• Define localised navigation structures for specific sections or site areas, including multilingual variants for region or language-specific content.

This isn't just helpful for editors – it also ensures consistency across your navigation, breadcrumbs, and internal search. And, because Site View data is exposed via the Contensis Delivery API, your development team can use it to power dynamic menus and navigation structures in any front end.

For organisations managing large estates – like universities with hundreds of courses or councils with dozens of service areas – Site View gives editorial teams the clarity and control they need to manage structure at scale.

It also supports incremental rollouts and agile development. Because you can organise and publish content section by section, Site View makes it easier to launch new parts of your site without affecting the rest. That's especially valuable when paired with Contensis' built-in reverse proxy support, which allows hybrid sites to run smoothly during a phased migration.

By combining visual structure with flexible delivery, Site View bridges the gap between the clarity of traditional CMSs and the power of a headless platform.

While Site View gives editors the tools to manage structure visually, Contensis also makes that structure usable across your digital estate. Navigation, breadcrumbs, and contextual links can all be built dynamically using the same underlying data that powers your site hierarchy.

This means you don't have to hardcode menus, breadcrumbs, or links – and you don't need to rely on manual updates to keep them in sync with your content. Because navigation is powered by the same structured data that drives your content models and Site View, it can be generated and updated automatically through the Contensis Delivery API.

This allows developers to build menus that reflect your site structure, breadcrumbs that reflect where content lives, and listing pages that show content by topic, category, or relationship – all without duplicating effort or rewiring things when content changes.

For example, if a university adds a new course under a department section, that course can automatically appear in the right menu, be listed in relevant search results, and display breadcrumbs that match the hierarchy – all without any manual setup. Similarly, if a council updates its services or adds a new language variant, its website navigation will update too.

Because the navigation is driven by structured content and API logic, it stays consistent across different devices and front ends. Whether you're building a public website, an internal dashboard, or a mobile app, your navigation stays accurate, up-to-date, and grounded in your IA.

This level of flexibility is what makes Contensis particularly suited to organisations managing complex digital estates. You get the power of headless delivery with IA-aware structure and logic baked in.

Structured content is the foundation of good information architecture. It defines what content exists, how it should be organised, and how different pieces of content relate to each other.

Without clear and consistent content models, it's difficult to create logical site structures, power dynamic navigation, or maintain consistency across a large site. Structured content makes it easier to scale your information architecture, support content reuse, and deliver a consistent user experience across different channels and touchpoints.

When your content is broken down into meaningful, modular parts, it's easier to organise, easier to relate, and easier for both users and systems to understand.

In Contensis, this starts with flexible content models that reflect how your organisation actually works – whether you're managing services, policies, locations, people, or events.

You're not locked into generic content types. Instead, you can define your own content models with the fields, formats, and validation rules that reflect your real-world requirements – from a course's entry requirements and fees to a service's eligibility criteria and contact details.

For example, a university might define a Course content type with fields for course title, UCAS code, start dates, modules, and fees, then relate that content to entries for staff, departments, and locations. If a department name changes or a tuition fee is updated, that change only needs to be made once – and it will automatically propagate everywhere it's used.

Contensis also supports nested components and reusable fields, allowing you to build flexible content structures without duplicating effort. Editors can work with drag-and-drop composers or block-based editors like Canvas, while developers and strategists retain complete control over how content is stored and presented.

The result is a consistent, future-ready content structure that supports multi-channel delivery, reduces editorial overhead, and makes your IA easier to maintain at scale.

One organisation already seeing these benefits is Heriot-Watt University. When they migrated from their legacy CMS to Contensis, they used the opportunity to restructure how they managed their course content. Working in a blended project squad with members of our professional services team, they created flexible content models for courses, departments, and people, allowing them to reflect real-world relationships directly in the CMS.

Not only did this approach support a faster, more accurate editorial workflow, it also enabled hourly synchronisation with their curriculum management system, Akari. Course information is now created or updated automatically in Contensis as it's published in Akari, saving time and reducing duplication.

Their new structure also meant that course content could be reused across listings, department pages, and related staff profiles – helping to keep information accurate and consistent across the site. As a result, the Heriot-Watt team launched their first release – a new undergraduate course section – in just seven sprints, with 102 course entries and over 6,000 total content items created in Contensis.

This structured approach didn't just improve internal workflows. It also supported better navigation and clearer relationships and improved the search experience for users looking to explore academic options.

Good information architecture doesn't stop at structure and navigation – it also depends on how your content is described, categorised, and labelled. That's where metadata and tagging come in.

In Contensis, you can add structured metadata and categorise content in ways that make it easier for both humans and machines to understand. This supports everything from faster internal search to better SEO performance and improved accessibility.

Rather than relying on fixed taxonomy trees, Contensis encourages you to model categories and topics as entries in their own right – such as services, departments, or themes – and link other entries to them. This gives you more control and flexibility while keeping relationships structured and explicit.

Contensis lets you:

• Model categories and topics as entries in their own right – such as services, departments, or themes – and link other entries to them.
• Define relationships between content types, such as linking people to departments or events to locations.
• Add structured metadata fields such as descriptions, schema.org markup, and Open Graph tags.
• Tag entries with labels that reflect your users' language, not just internal team structures.
• Ensure consistent structure for screen readers and assistive technologies through accessible headings and labels.

You can also use our new tag builder to manage tags centrally across assets and entries, making it easier to apply consistent labelling and track how content is being used.

For example, a council might tag its bin collection content with terms like "waste disposal," "household waste," and "recycling." That means residents can find the information using familiar language, whether they're searching the site, asking a chatbot, or navigating via voice assistant.

Well-structured metadata also supports AI-readiness. Labelling what content is, when it was updated, and how it connects to other entries makes it easier for search engines and AI models to interpret your content accurately – increasing visibility and trust.

In Contensis, metadata and taxonomy are built into the content model from the start, not added as an afterthought. That makes them easier to manage, reuse, and govern at scale.

Information architecture isn't something you set and forget. Teams change. Content grows. Priorities shift. If you don't have the proper controls in place, it's easy for your IA to drift over time – especially in large organisations with multiple editors and departments.

Contensis includes governance and workflow features designed to help you manage this change safely. You can:

• Configure granular Site View permissions to control who can create, rename, move, or delete sections of your site structure. This ensures only authorised users can make structural changes, while giving other users appropriate access to view or edit content in context.
• Set role-based permissions across content types to limit who can edit, publish, or manage specific content models. This is useful for devolved publishing or in multi-team environments.
• Create approval workflows that ensure changes to content are reviewed before going live, whether it's a simple sign-off or a multi-stage editorial process.
• Track changes and restore previous versions with complete version history and the option to roll back, so accidental changes or structural edits can be undone.
• Audit activity across teams with comprehensive logs showing who changed what, when, and why – giving governance and compliance teams confidence in the process

These features help you strike the right balance between flexibility and control. For example, a university might allow faculty teams to manage their own course content within their section of Site View, while keeping core navigation locked down. A council might give teams the freedom to update service pages, while a central digital team oversees structure and governance. Meanwhile, a large enterprise could maintain strict publishing workflows for its legal or compliance pages while giving marketing teams more flexibility to update campaign content quickly.

Whether you're coordinating updates across multiple departments or maintaining consistency in a fast-moving organisation, Contensis provides the tools to keep your IA accurate, compliant, and adaptable over time.

It's easy for IA to become an afterthought in headless projects. The structure that holds everything together – URLs, relationships, navigation, even section labels – can end up fragmented or invisible, especially when different teams are responsible for different parts of the site.

Contensis helps you bring that structure back into focus. It gives you:

• A visual interface for managing hierarchy so editors can see precisely where content sits on the site
• Structured content modelling tools that reflect the real-world complexity of your organisation
• Dynamic navigation powered by APIs, so structure and relationships stay in sync across platforms
• Governance and workflow features that help your IA evolve safely over time

This isn't about returning to the rigid, page-based CMSs of the past. It's about giving teams the tools to manage complexity without losing clarity – and the confidence to evolve your site's structure as your organisation changes.

So, whether you're managing a complex university site, a multi-department council platform, or a growing enterprise ecosystem, Contensis helps you keep your IA clear, usable, and future-ready.