How Contensis supports front-end composability and design system integration

In our two previous blogs, we explored what composability means – and how teams can build more consistent, scalable front ends by combining structured content, modular components, and clear governance.

But understanding the principles is only half the story. Putting them into practice across a large, multi-team organisation is where things often fall apart.

This blog looks at how Contensis supports front-end composability – not just in theory, but in the messy reality of enterprise digital estates. Whether you're managing five websites or fifty, Contensis gives your teams the tools to work with a shared design system, structure their content effectively, and deliver consistent user experiences at scale.

In our last blog, we looked at how a composable front end helps large organisations scale consistent user experiences across multiple sites, services, and teams. In this post, we’ll dig into what that actually looks like in practice and how Contensis supports it.

Front-end composability means being able to reuse your design system and content structure across different contexts, without sacrificing flexibility or governance.

Creating a composable front end involves three key elements:

• A design system of reusable elements, components, and patterns
• A front-end application or codebase with components that implement those patterns
• A content management system with structured content that maps cleanly to those components

Each of these parts plays a distinct role. The design system defines how things should look and behave. The front-end app brings those patterns to life in code. And the CMS delivers the structured content that flows into those components, powering consistent experiences across channels and services.

If you're working in a university, council, or enterprise organisation, you’re likely already managing multiple digital properties – including websites, intranets or portals, and native applications – each with its own requirements. You’re probably working across distributed teams. And you’re likely already aware of the dangers of design drift, duplication, or bottlenecks in getting content live.

Composable front ends help solve these problems by:

• Giving developers reusable front-end components that reflect your brand and accessibility standards
• Giving content teams structured models that map to those components
• Letting editors build pages by assembling approved building blocks – not reinventing layouts from scratch for each new campaign
• Enabling consistent deployment and navigation logic across sites, without locking everyone into a single stack

Done right, this approach makes it easier to:

• Deliver joined-up user experiences across services, departments, and brands
• Move faster without losing control of accessibility, tone, or design integrity
• Scale content and design changes with less manual effort and rework
• Support multiple teams working in parallel across shared tools and infrastructure

Contensis supports this by bringing together structured content, flexible page assembly tools, and front-end deployment infrastructure – all with governance and collaboration built in. In the sections that follow, we’ll show how those pieces come together in practice.

The foundation of any composable front end is clean, structured content. Without it, components become containers for inconsistent blobs of text, making content hard to reuse or govern.

Contensis lets you create content types that reflect the real-world things your organisation publishes. These could be courses, events, services, staff profiles, policies, or any other form of content your organisation needs to store. Each type is defined by a set of fields – title, summary, image, CTA label, related links, and so on – and those fields can be grouped, nested, or reused across types.

These structured entries map directly onto your front-end components. For example:

• A Course content type might include fields that populate a course summary card, a detailed course page, and a related listing on a department page.
• A Person content type might power team listings, individual profiles, and cross-referenced authorship across blogs or events.

Because the content is stored in a format that’s presentation-agnostic (JSON), it can be surfaced in any channel, from your main site to microsites, apps, search tools, or internal dashboards.

Structured content also enables:

• Consistent metadata for search and SEO
• Automated link generation and breadcrumb trails
• Governance rules (e.g. required fields, character limits, validation)
• Easier syncing with external systems (e.g. CRMs, academic systems)

With Contensis, content becomes part of your design system, not something that risks breaking it.

One of the hardest problems in large organisations is managing the space between rigid templates and full creative freedom.

Design systems help bring consistency to visual elements. But unless your CMS gives editors the right building blocks – and the right boundaries – it's easy for things to drift. One team creates a new layout. Another overrides a pattern. Before long, your front end starts to look like a patchwork of slightly mismatched designs.

Contensis’ composer field helps you avoid this. It’s a field type in Contensis that allows teams to create composable landing pages using predefined components – each mapped to your design system and controlled through code.

Here’s how it works:

• Developers define which components are available in a composer – like hero banners, pull quotes, text-image blocks, or custom forms.
• They configure each component’s properties – controlling which values content authors can change, and how they behave across devices or brands.
• Editors build pages by assembling these components in any order – adding, removing, and reordering them in an intuitive interface.

At the heart of this are component fields – reusable groups of fields that bring your front-end components into the CMS in a consistent, governed way. Each component field represents a slot where editors can drop content that maps cleanly to a specific design system component. They include input fields, validation rules, and settings that match how the component behaves in code and can be modelled to represent anything from simple CTAs or cards to complex hero banners or tabbed content areas.

For example, a Call to Action component field might include inputs for text, a URL, and a theme picker. Editors can only enter content in the format that matches what the front end expects. That means fewer errors, cleaner content delivery, and a tighter coupling between design and content – without needing developers to intervene every time.

Because component fields are centrally managed and referenceable, they scale easily:

• Developers can update how a component works or looks in one place and roll out changes everywhere, with no need to hunt down rogue layouts or fix styling issues across 30 different pages.
• Content designers get familiar, brand-compliant building blocks to work with, without needing to understand the underlying front-end logic.
• Digital teams reduce duplication by using the same components across multiple models and layouts.

This gives content teams the ability to move fast – creating pages for campaigns, services, or announcements – without needing design input or developer support each time. But because each component is governed centrally, you avoid design drift, accessibility issues, or accidental breakage.

In a headless setup, content and front end are decoupled. That’s the point – it gives organisations the freedom to choose the best tools for each layer and adapt their architecture as needs evolve. But it also raises a challenge – how do content teams preview what a page will actually look like once it’s published?

That’s where Blocks come in.

Blocks are containers for your front-end code, deployed to Contensis infrastructure. Most organisations use a single Block to deploy their main front-end application – often a React or Vue app that pulls content from Contensis using the Delivery API.

This setup provides several benefits to busy teams:

• Editors can preview Composer pages and structured entries on the actual front end
• Developers retain full control over rendering and logic
• Contensis handles the deployment infrastructure behind the scenes

And, behind the scenes, Blocks are packaged as Docker images, which means:

• You’re not tied to a vendor-specific theming layer – you can use the framework or tooling that suits your needs
• You get full version history and rollback, so you can release new code with confidence – and undo changes from inside Contensis if something goes wrong
• You can preview changes before they go live – content and front-end together

This makes Blocks a great fit for organisations that want full control over a headless front end, without having to spin up and manage their own DevOps pipelines.

And while most customers run a single Block for their main site, you can use additional Blocks to run other apps and services – from simple microsites to complex integrations with external platforms.

So whether you’re deploying a full React app, adding a new microsite, or running server-side logic to support your content, Blocks give you a clean, scalable foundation – right inside Contensis.

Composability only works when everyone pulls in the same direction. That means giving different teams the freedom to do their jobs – without compromising structure, quality, or consistency.

In large organisations, that’s easier said than done. You’ve got developers managing design systems, content teams pushing out updates, marketers building campaign pages, and stakeholders who need confidence in the end result. Without clear rules and roles, things fall apart fast.

Contensis is built from the ground-up with enterprise governance in mind. You can:

• Assign roles and permissions to control who can edit, publish, or update entries created from each content type
• Restrict access to content types and components, so only the right teams can make structural changes
• Use structured workflows to manage approvals and reviews, whether that’s a single sign-off or a multi-stage editorial process
• Track every change with full version history, audit logs, and rollback
• Preview pages exactly as they’ll appear – so you can see how your content, layout, and front end look when they’re combined

These features let your teams move faster, with confidence that what they’re doing fits the system and won’t break anything else.

And, because content and structure are separated in Contensis, you can safely devolve responsibility. Local teams can manage their own pages and content. Central teams can own the design system, content models, and approval flows. Everyone works within the same composable platform, but with the right level of control.

When the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) set out to improve the user experience of their programme pages, they chose a composable approach – prioritising flexibility, consistency, and future scalability.

We supported their team in modelling structured content types for courses, modules, and staff. They then deployed a React-based application as a Contensis Block, consuming content via the Delivery API. Composer fields gave editors the freedom to build rich, engaging pages while ensuring all content stayed aligned with their central design system.

The results speak for themselves:

• 71% increase in lead form submissions
• 6.6% drop in bounce rate
• 6% increase in average time on page

By combining structured content, reusable components, and a modern publishing workflow, LSE created a better experience for users and a more sustainable model for digital delivery across departments.

Composable front ends aren’t just about tech. They’re about solving real problems in large organisations – things like managing complex estates, avoiding rework, rolling out design changes at scale, and letting teams move fast without breaking things.

Contensis brings the right pieces together:

• Structured content that reflects how your organisation actually works
• Composer fields that let content teams build pages flexibly but with guardrails to protect brand integrity and content quality
• Component fields that mirror your design system, not fight against it
• A deployment platform that supports previewing, versioning, and rolling back without extra infrastructure
• Governance tools that let local teams publish confidently, while central teams keep everything on track

It’s a platform that works for developers, designers, and content teams – not just in theory, but in the messy, multi-stakeholder reality of enterprise publishing.

If you’re serious about delivering consistent, flexible, and scalable digital experiences across your estate, Contensis gives you the foundation to do it – and keep doing it as things grow.