How structured content models help CMS projects survive website redesigns

Digital agency M8 has shared lessons from deploying Sanity CMS across multiple client projects, including Kasada, Contextual AI, and Hy-Vee, highlighting that defining content structure before page layouts leads to more durable systems. The core principle is modeling stable entities — such as authors, clients, and sectors — as reusable documents rather than embedding repeated strings tied to specific page templates. This approach enables content to be filtered, cross-linked, and repurposed across different layouts without requiring schema changes every time a site is redesigned. The team also emphasized that CMS migrations should begin with a thorough content audit and a settled target model, rather than letting the migration script itself determine how content is structured. On query complexity, they recommend revisiting the schema whenever rendering a single content card requires more than three nested joins in GROQ, as this often signals that presentation logic has leaked into the content model.