WordPress is undoubtedly the most prevalent CMS in the world, as 43.5% of all websites use it as their CMS. The problem, however, is that it contains many disadvantages of a typical transitional CMS, which ultimately discourag people from using it.
For companies that want to continue using Wordpress for content management, you might come across the solution of building a headless Wordpress site. Headless
WordPress is a decoupled version of the traditional WordPress CMS, the idea is to use WordPress as a content repository while using another custom frontend stack to display that content (for example: combining a React(-like) library with WordPress).
This approach comes with 2 main advantages:
- If you've been using WordPress, you don't need to perform a large migration, saving operational costs
- No learning curves for content editors
However, we reckon this is not an ideal solution as it comes with many downsides. The top 3 are:
- Performance: Headless WordPress still carries the overhead of the WordPress core, which includes features not always necessary in a headless context. This could impact performance, especially if the site experiences high traffic or requires real-time updates. We've had a customer with page loading times of 3+ seconds due to the burden of WordPress plugins prior to adopting Hygraph.
- Complexity: Implementing a headless architecture on top of WordPress can add complexity to the development process. Developers need to manage both the WordPress backend and the separate frontend application, leading to potentially more intricate deployment and maintenance procedures. Alot of daily tweaking is necessary to keep the whole website running.
- Limited flexibility: Flexibility is one of the biggest reasons you ever wanted to move to a headless CMS. However, headless WordPress is only a mediocre compromise. It gives only enough flexibility to decouple the frontend from the backend but can barely keep up with the flexibility that a native headless CMS grants. Customizing WordPress for headless purposes might require workarounds due to its heritage as a coupled CMS.
While headless WordPress offers the familiar interface and ecosystem of WordPress, it may not provide the same level of optimization, flexibility, and scalability as a native Headless CMS designed specifically for headless architectures. A CMS migration might seem daunting, but with careful planning and support from a customer-centric headless CMS vendor, the ROl of the migration is more beneficial than the operational fee it costs.