Payload CMS overview
What Payload is, what you can do in it, and how it relates to the rest of your storefront.
Payload CMS is where you edit the content on your website. Every headline, every image, every paragraph of text, every menu item — it all lives in Payload. If a customer can see it on your site, you can change it here.
What's inside Payload
Payload has two kinds of content areas in the sidebar: Collections (things you have many of, like pages or blog posts) and Globals (one-of-a-kind things, like the homepage, header, and footer).
Collections you'll use most
- Pages — dynamic pages with their own URLs (About, Contact, custom landing pages). The homepage is not here — it's a global (see below).
- Blog Articles — blog posts.
- Articles — news articles.
- FAQs — individual FAQ entries.
- Media — all the images, PDFs, and other files you've uploaded. When you add an image anywhere, it comes from here.
Globals you'll use most
- Homepage — the home page at
/. - Header — the main navigation menu.
- Footer — footer links and content.
- Global Alerts — site-wide banner announcements.
- Contact Us — the contact page's settings.
- Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions, Cookie Policy — policy pages.
Other collections and globals may appear depending on what features your storefront has. The interface works the same way for all of them: click to open, edit, save.
Saving in Payload is immediate and live. There is no draft/publish workflow — the moment you click Save, customers see the change. Always use the live preview before saving. See Saving your work.
What you can do
Here are the most common tasks:
- Log in — find the admin URL and sign in for the first time.
- Edit the homepage — change the hero banner, feature blocks, and promotional content on the home page.
- Edit site navigation — add, remove, or reorder links in the header and footer.
- Add and manage images — upload new images, find ones you've already uploaded, and swap images in a page.
- Create a form — build a contact or enquiry form and view submissions.
- Set up SEO — write the titles and descriptions that appear in Google.
- Work with languages — if your site supports more than one language, how translations work.
- Save your work — what saving actually does (since there are no drafts), how to preview, and how to recover from a mistake.
What Payload is not for
If you want to change a product's price, the stock level of an item, or anything about an order or customer, you need Vendure instead. Product information shown on your website is pulled automatically from Vendure — you don't edit it in Payload.