How to Use Contentful

Contentful is a headless CMS — it manages your content but has no built-in front-end, leaving you to build and render the actual website or app yourself.

Step 1: Define a Content Model

Before adding any content, design "content types" — like BlogPost or Product — and their fields. This is Contentful's schema, similar to defining a database structure up front.

Step 2: Create entries

Content editors fill in entries based on those content types, and Contentful handles versioning and drafts, so you can edit without immediately publishing.

Step 3: Structure content with references

One entry can reference another — a BlogPost referencing an Author entry — so shared content lives in one place instead of being duplicated across pages.

Step 4: Fetch via API

Your app fetches content through the Content Delivery API, either GraphQL or REST, and renders it however you like — Contentful supplies the content, not the presentation layer.

Step 5: Set up environments

A staging environment lets you test content model changes before applying them to production, without risking live content in the process.

Where it bites

Because Contentful is headless, you're always building or maintaining the actual front-end yourself in a separate codebase. Teams expecting a website builder out of the box are often surprised there's no visual page editor included by default.