Headless web agency in Marseille: what going headless changes for your website
Faster, more secure, better ranked: what a headless website brings to a Marseille business, what it costs, and how to choose the agency that will build it.
By Léo Chuzel · Published on · 5 min read
“Headless” appears more and more often in quotes from web agencies in Marseille. Behind this slightly technical word lies a different way of building a website, already adopted by major brands and now within reach of small and medium-sized businesses. This guide explains what headless actually changes for your business, when it’s worth the investment, and how to spot an agency that truly masters it.
Headless in two sentences
A traditional website, such as a WordPress site, combines in a single piece of software the back office where you enter your content and the pages your visitors see. A headless website separates the two: your content is managed in a headless CMS (Payload, Strapi, Sanity…), and the website itself is an independent application, most often built with Next.js, which fetches that content through an API.
For you, the back office is still a back office: you edit your texts, photos and pages just as before. What changes is everything that happens behind the scenes, and what your visitors experience. For a detailed comparison of the two approaches, read our article Headless CMS or WordPress.
Why Marseille businesses are interested
In Marseille, as in Aix-en-Provence or Aubagne, competition on Google is often decided by a few positions on very local searches. And most searches are made on a phone, sometimes on 4G in the street. In this context, headless brings very concrete advantages:
- Speed: pages are generated in advance and served from a network of servers close to your visitors. They display almost instantly, which weighs on Core Web Vitals and on the conversion rate.
- Security: no plugins to update every week, no login page exposed on your public website. The main source of WordPress hacks disappears.
- Design freedom: no theme constraints. The website is designed for your business, with tailor-made animations and user journeys, without weighing pages down.
- Multilingual content: tourism, cruise passengers, international business clients… A headless CMS handles several languages cleanly, with the hreflang tags Google expects. See our guide to multilingual websites.
- One back office for several uses: the same CMS can feed your website, a Shopify store, a mobile app or an in-store screen.
What headless changes for SEO
Well built, a headless website is excellent ground for SEO: fast pages, clean code, full control over every tag. Pages must be rendered on the server or generated statically so that Google can read them immediately, as we explain in our article SSR, SSG or CSR.
But everything a WordPress site with Yoast did automatically becomes the agency’s job: sitemap, canonical tags, titles and descriptions, structured data, redirects, error pages. It’s also an opportunity to go further, for example by preparing the website to be cited by AI tools such as ChatGPT, which we cover in our guide to GEO.
Headless or traditional website: for which project?
Headless makes sense if…
- your website is a central sales tool, and every conversion point counts;
- you publish a lot of content (news, guides, product sheets, case studies) and want to structure it properly;
- you target several languages or several countries;
- your website needs to connect to other tools: CRM, business software, online store, booking;
- your brand image calls for design and interactions out of the ordinary.
A traditional website is enough if…
- you need a simple brochure website of a few pages, rarely updated;
- your budget is tight and the deadline very short;
- you want to install plugins yourself without going through a developer.
For a full overview of the options, see our comparison WordPress, Wix, Shopify or custom.
How much does a headless website cost in Marseille?
A headless website is always a custom website: its price depends on the design, the number of content types and the integrations. As an order of magnitude observed on the market:
- Headless brochure website (Next.js + CMS): generally between €6,000 and €15,000, with design, SEO copywriting and multilingual content included or not depending on the scope.
- Content-rich or multilingual website: from €12,000 to €30,000, depending on the volume of content and page templates.
- Headless Shopify store: rarely under €15,000. We break down this budget in our article Headless Shopify: benefits, costs and when to take the plunge.
As for recurring costs, hosting a headless brochure website (Vercel, managed database, media storage) ranges from zero to a few dozen euros a month. Add technical maintenance, as with any custom website. To put these amounts in context, see our guide to the cost of a website in Marseille.
How to choose a headless web agency in Marseille
Many agencies display the word “headless”; few have actually put it into production. Ask these questions before signing:
- Which stack do you use, and why? A clear answer (for example Next.js, Payload CMS, Vercel) is worth more than a list of trendy technologies.
- Can you show me a headless website you have launched? Test it on your phone and in PageSpeed Insights.
- Who handles technical SEO? Sitemap, canonicals, structured data and redirects must be planned from the start, not after launch.
- Will I be able to edit my website on my own? Ask for a demo of the back office, with live preview of your changes.
- Who owns the code, the hosting and the accounts? They must be in your name, so you can change provider without rebuilding everything.
- What does maintenance include? Dependency updates, backups, monitoring, small improvements.
For other, more general criteria, read our guide how to choose your web agency in Marseille.
Our approach at SOBO
At SOBO, we build our websites with Next.js, with Payload CMS as the back office and hosting on Vercel. The website you are reading is an example: content in three languages, a back office with live preview, pages generated in advance and high PageSpeed scores. For e-commerce, we connect this foundation to Shopify in headless mode.
Based in Lisbon, we are in Marseille very regularly to meet our clients. Every project starts with a free audit, and we’ll tell you frankly whether headless is the right choice for you, or whether a simpler website will do. Discover our website design in Marseille and website redesign services or our web agency in Marseille page, then let’s talk about your project.