Top Use Cases for PayloadCMS: Is It Right for You?

In this guide, I'm going to go over when you should use PayloadCMS.

When to Use Payload CMS

You should use PayloadCMS whenever you need a headless CMS. This is particularly true when you’re using Next.js. There are other options of headless CMSes, and you can use PayloadCMS in other environments outside of Next.js, but the experience is more seamless when using Next.js and PayloadCMS together.

You should also consider using PayloadCMS if you need a customizable and flexible e-commerce platform. Off-the-shelf solutions are typically rigid and don’t allow you to extend the functionality of the platform—at least not as well as PayloadCMS does.

PayloadCMS is also great for building websites with blogs or other content-heavy sections. From small blogs to full enterprise-level websites with multiple sections of resources, PayloadCMS makes it easy to serve content across use cases. It’s easy to create new collections on the backend to then render on the frontend of the site.

Since Next.js can be used as a static site generator as well, anytime you need SSG is a perfect time to use PayloadCMS. The same is true for when you want to use on-demand revalidation (ODR) with incremental static regeneration (ISR). PayloadCMS makes it easy to use hooks to automatically trigger cache refreshes to your content.

One last reason to use PayloadCMS: the local API. This makes it very easy to communicate with your backend from the frontend. The Local API is an intuitive way to query your backend with exactly what you want. With PayloadCMS, the Local API is typed, as well, so your IDE should be able to assist you in querying the backend with ease.