Website technology is rapidly evolving, even for the simplest sites. It’s natural for website owners to want modern tools. Headless WordPress websites claim to offer more flexibility and scalability than traditional WordPress. But is it the right choice for your site?
Here’s an overview of headless WordPress and the essential elements for using it. Discover how it compares to traditional WordPress in terms of development, user experience, and maintenance.
What Is Headless WordPress?
Traditional WordPress is a complete website solution. It provides back-end content management and front-end tools for building and displaying websites to visitors. Designed to be beginner-friendly, the platform has evolved over the years. It now offers greater functionality through thousands of plugins, along with custom themes or plugin development. These additions enable users to install contact forms, SEO tools, and much more.
With headless WordPress, developers or site owners still use WordPress for back-end content management. However, they can choose any other technology for front-end tasks.
Benefits of Headless WordPress
There are several benefits to separating the back-end from the front-end when it comes to website building in some cases, including:
- Using a headless content management system can speed up the website. Developers can code more efficiently than many WordPress themes. The site no longer needs to render content directly from the database.
- It can be easier to integrate data from other sources, such as a commerce platform, into your WordPress site. You can also use your WordPress data in other applications.
- If the front-end platform is not too complex, Headless WordPress can be more affordable than many other headless content management systems. However, connecting the back and front ends commonly adds complexity and cost to development, maintenance, and support.
- Increased scalability with the back-end and front-end able to be scaled independently.
- Enhanced security, as separating the front-end and back-end through static assets and no active web servers or reachable database.
- The ability to update and migrate data as technology changes in the future without disrupting the site’s back-end stability.
- The opportunity to highly customize the site without being forced to conform to WordPress themes, though custom WordPress themes can do pretty much anything a simple site would need.
While headless WordPress offers many benefits, it isn’t appropriate for everyone. Those who are uncomfortable writing their own code, need their site up quickly, or don’t want to worry about making it SEO-friendly are typically better served by the built-in options and functionality that traditional WordPress offers.
What You Need to Implement Headless WordPress
While headless WordPress can be a great solution for those who want a highly customized, fast site that is ready to embrace the technologies of the future, there are a few requirements for using it, not the least of which is the technical expertise to set up and maintain it. Developers must be familiar with headless architecture, APIs, and the front-end framework you choose. Because the front-end and back-end of the site are separated, they must be maintained separately, and problems can arise on either end.
You will need to choose a front-end framework, such as React, Vue.js, or Angular, to deliver a dynamic experience and allow you to deliver the content across multiple channels.
You will also need a managed WordPress host who specializes in headless setups and offers built-in caching and performance optimization to keep the website running fast. A faster website is one of the main reasons for using headless WordPress in the first place. You can take advantage of some of the WordPress plugins, including WP REST API or WPGraphQL, to allow the front end and the back end to talk to one another.
Headless WordPress Vs. Traditional WordPress for Standard Sites
Every business has a unique reason for its website and unique demands on how the website conforms. Traditional WordPress provides an extensive library of templates and themes to make the process of building a website as user-friendly as possible, so even small businesses without a development team or knowledge of building a website can design a simple site. Here is a look at how using a headless system can impact the development process, user experience, and maintenance requirements for your site.
The Development Process is Simpler With Traditional WordPress
Using headless WordPress typically increases the cost and time involved in development, as there is a much steeper learning curve. Additionally, many of the plugins provided by WordPress will not work with headless setups. For simpler websites, the loss of these plugins and the hassles surrounding customization and integration using third-party products might not be necessary.
However, headless setups do provide several distinct advantages over building a website through traditional WordPress, including increased flexibility and creative control over the website’s look and feel. Further, they’re more modular than traditional setups, meaning that they can last long-term, even in the face of rapid developments in front-end technology.
Traditional WordPress Creates a More Favorable User Experience in Most Cases
In most cases, the user experience is more favorable for traditional WordPress with its built-in functionalities, such as previewing, the fact that it is easy to update, and more. Using a headless WordPress CMS platform has some positive impacts on the user experience over traditional WordPress sites in limited situations, including:
- Faster loading sites that involve a lot of content, as the pages are pre-rendered. Sites using traditional WordPress CHS, plugins, and themes can be weighted down and slow-loading, which can hurt search engine placement.
- The ability to publish content across multiple channels without formatting issues.
- Added security to protect your customer information. Users connect sites and applications using the WordPress API instead of logging in directly through a front-end server. This makes it more difficult for hackers to access the system.
- A unique look and feel, as traditional WordPress sites are limited in their visual appearance by the themes offered, though the variety of themes is more than ample for most users.
The performance of a traditional WordPress site can be harmed by how it renders content, slowing page loading. Additionally, the template-based system only makes content available as HTML within the structure defined by the template, which can create formatting issues across platforms.
Maintenance With Headless Systems Is Usually More Complex
Maintaining a split environment between the front and back ends of your site can involve complex coding. You are essentially creating two separate systems, requiring more updates, more security patches, and more troubleshooting. Building the front end from the ground up requires more development resources and a bigger budget in many cases. Switching your site from traditional WordPress can be difficult too, as you may lose some of your plugins. Going with a headless system may cause you to have to change the way your content management workflow.
Some of the additional maintenance considerations involved in switching from traditional WordPress to a headless system include caching and performance optimization, which impacts user experience; ensuring that API endpoints are securely configured; setting up monitoring and logging tools to track site performance and security; and determining the proper development and framework tools to streamline front end processes. Essentially, converting to a headless system potentially adds multiple points of failure and additional time needed for debugging with decoupled platforms.
The Bottom Line on Using Headless WordPress for Simple Websites
To be certain, there are very good reasons why headless WordPress is an appropriate solution in certain cases. Websites requiring a high degree of customization and interactivity on every page can benefit from separating the creative presentation of the front end as well as the security and administrative capabilities of the back end. Examples of the types of websites where this may be key include those used in publishing, media, or entertainment industries, as well as ecommerce sites.
For most website owners and developers, keeping things simple means sticking with traditional WordPress, as it provides a stable, relatively customizable, all-in-one solution ideal for beginners and those who don’t want to completely rebuild the front end for a specific purpose, such as scaling or publishing across multiple channels. Where headless WordPress shines is with sites that have higher interactivity or multi-channel delivery. If your in-house development team does not have the technical expertise needed for a headless setup or for simple websites that don’t need a lot of interactive features, it is often better to use traditional WordPress.
Need Solutions for Your WordPress Website? Trust Ndevr
Are you happy with your website’s look and feel? Do you want to enhance user experience and functionality or build a site that can grow with your business? Would you like to migrate to WordPress? Whatever your WordPress website needs, Ndevr can help.
Ndevr specializes in the development and support of WordPress websites. We offer unique solutions to help improve the performance of our clients’ websites. Our lead architects have more than 20 years of experience, and we aim to build long-term relationships with our clients. Some of our services include increasing the site’s speed and alleviating development team challenges. We help eliminate security flaws, content management inefficiencies, and user experience issues. We understand how important it is that your website aligns with your innovation, passion, and organization’s goals. You need quick solutions that can be maintained without breaking the bank or taking too much of your most precious resource: your time. If you’d like to learn more about headless WordPress and other services that might better fit your needs, contact us today.
