Headless Umbraco Platform — Propeller Software

A regional media organisation needed to move away from their monolithic Umbraco front-end to a headless architecture that could power both web and a forthcoming mobile app from a single content source.

The challenge

The existing Umbraco 10 site had tightly coupled Razor views that made content reuse across channels impossible. An editorial team publishing news daily needed zero disruption during migration.

Approach

We built the new platform on Umbraco 13’s Content Delivery API, giving the editorial team the same familiar back-office while exposing all content through a versioned REST endpoint. The Next.js 14 front-end consumes this API with Incremental Static Regeneration, keeping page loads under 200ms without sacrificing editorial freshness.

Azure CDN sits in front with a custom purge strategy — only pages touching changed content are invalidated. The result is effectively static performance with real-time editorial control.

Outcome

Core Web Vitals moved from mid-tier to the top 10% for their category
Build times under 3 minutes for a 12,000-page site
Editorial team experienced zero workflow interruption during migration