Picking a headless CMS in 2026: a short, opinionated guide

The shortest version: most teams over-track and under-act. We've spent the last six months auditing client setups, and the same handful of mistakes show up almost every time.

In this piece I want to walk through the actual framework we use on day one of a new engagement — what we measure, what we ignore, and the smallest dashboard that makes a real decision possible.

Start with the question, not the metric

Before opening any analytics tool, write down the three questions leadership is actually trying to answer. If your dashboard doesn't answer one of them in under five seconds, it's the wrong dashboard.

"We don't need more data. We need fewer numbers, watched more closely."

The four-metric floor

Every site we ship leaves with the same baseline: one acquisition metric, one engagement metric, one conversion metric, and one health check.

• Qualified sessions (not raw visits)
• Activation rate (the one action that predicts retention)
• Lead-to-meeting conversion
• Core Web Vitals — INP and LCP only

What we've stopped tracking

Bounce rate. Average session duration. Pageviews per session. None of these correlate well enough with revenue to justify the dashboard real estate.