Headless WordPress Vs WordPress for modern websites

WordPress has been ruling the market for years and you might have gone through a debate on WordPress.org Vs WordPress.com. However, recently a new term was heard “headless WordPress”, this is just not a new term for WordPress CMS with added facilities and features. Rather it is a whole new technology and a modern era of website development. 

A brief on headless WordPress

A headless WordPress website uses WordPress for managing content and some other frontend stack to display that content. Headless WordPress allows content writers to use their favorite interface while giving web developers the freedom to use any frontend stack. 

Using another technology for the front end and using WordPress for a web presence is done by headless WordPress. The front end and back end are usually the two parts of the content management system. The management part is done in the back end. Managing various aspects of the website as settings, appearance, and other users, create and publish blog posts and pages is done there in WordPress. 

The user interface of headless WordPress

The user interface on the website is the front end. To change appearance and update pages a Rest API is used in WordPress. The coupling of the front end and back end in CMS works well and provides both to easily build websites and manage written content. But the problem arises that both the front end and back end are not separated from each other as they depend on each other. 

A headless CMS separates the front end and back end and leaving only the back end as a whole. So there are databases, admin panel, and content management tools, but there are no themes on the website. And by using REST API anything can be done. By headless WordPress back end used for any purpose. Make websites, app, or content management tools, and so on.

Pros and Cons of Traditional WordPress 

Benefits of WordPress 

• Complex sites for corporations, small businesses create personal blogs WordPress sites are helpful. Show portfolio, host a social network, group, podcast full services of eCommerce stores WordPress sites contains all.
• WordPress is Flexible and Adaptable for Changing Needs. WordPress website is user-friendly, A WordPress website is installed and running in minutes, even without any technical expertise.
• The appearance and functions of a website can be changed by using WordPress themes.
• WordPress plugin directory includes plugins for performing specific tasks and allows to add features Variety of tools and plugins for optimizing content for SEO WordPress includes which tend to rank high WordPress sites.
• WordPress Sites have a Built-In Blog and have multiple features that make publishing content easy.
• WooCommerce, the free eCommerce plugin for WordPress, enables the creation of e-commerce stores that are highly appealing and feature-based.

Drawbacks of WordPress CMS

• Lots of Plugins For Additional Features are needed which are difficult. Frequent Themes and Plugin Updates are other problems that arise in WordPress sites.
• WordPress website plugins, oversaturated databases, codebases, large images, and a lot of words on a page can slow down the speed of sites.
• For limited SEO optimizing features in the WordPress package, it is not enough for rank in google.
• Without notice websites of WordPress sites be down for many reasons. Removing a date field requires an understanding of PHP language, so for modifications in WordPress website PHP knowledge is required.
• The additional content of the page and script is not protected as in other applications. As WordPress is an open-source platform, many plugins,, and themes for customization are implemented, which are from different vendors and easily contain bugs or malicious code lines.

Pros and Cons of Headless WordPress 

Benefits of Headless WordPress

• The most significant use of Headless WordPress is that it has the flexibility of publishing content on multiple channels in the meantime.
• As there is no front end to display content system consists of only database and APIs, so in redesigns, sites get less complicated and it can be done in a fraction of time.
• Headless WordPress website removes all unnecessary things which slow down the site, as it is consist of only database and API'S call, and the website load faster. This not only increases the page load speed like 10x, as its loading time is less than 3 seconds.
• The decoupled database makes it immune from SQL injections as it is extra secure from malicious hacking. Headless WordPress is an extremely safe approach,  like no front end so there is no way of security issue.
• Scalability is another key point of Headless WordPress sites.

Limitations of Headless WordPress

• Headless WordPress disables the ‘What You See Is What You Get’ (‘WYSIWYG’) editor which results in losing access to live preview options. This makes publishing content inconvenient.
• More advanced programming skills and more advanced libraries are needed to implement in Headless WordPress sites.
• It is expensive to work in two different environments and maintenance can be difficult.
• Contact forms, a website search, Native WordPress comments, Plugins such as Woocommerce, Buddypress, and WP members all stop working.

Why do we compare WP with headless WP?

You may wonder if both are WordPress and why do we need to compare? Why is it so different? Traditional WordPress is based on the concept of LAMP stack which is a monolithic approach of web development having all the data, information, and design on one platform. 

While on the other hand, Jamstack technology is the modern technology using headless WordPress as backend only CMS and decoupling frontend on a static site generator using modern JavaScript frameworks like ReactJS and Vue.JS. This is based on the concept of Microservices making the web more secure, fast, and scalable.

Conclusion

Headless WordPress CMS is now being used for sites, As it is faster than traditional WordPress.The security of Headless WordPress is higher than WordPress. Headless WordPress CMS includes flexible stack integration due to which it is easy to publish content on multiple channels. 

User experiences on sites are improving due to faster page loading time. Headless WordPress is cross-platform which makes it higher than traditional WordPress. Therefore it is concluded that Headless WordPress CMS improves performance, time, and efficiency.