Did you know that over 42.6% of the web uses WordPress? It’s no surprise, given that WordPress provides everything a webmaster with limited coding skills needs to design and run a full-fledged website. When it comes to creating and managing business websites, however, additional flexibility, performance, and security are required in today’s market. Fortunately, that’s where headless WordPress comes in. In this article, we’re going to explain why WordPress’s headless CMS open source is the CMS of the future and why you should say goodbye to traditional WordPress.
What Is a Traditional CMS and How Does It Work?
Before we get into headless CMSs, let’s take a moment first to focus on traditional CMSs and how they work. A traditional CMS (WordPress included) consists of a frontend and backend. The frontend is the part of the website that visitors see and interact with while the backend is the content management system or admin panel, where data is stored and managed. Business owners and developers can add new content, manage plugins, and customize fonts using the backend, which then displays those changes immediately on the frontend. The frontend primarily uses four languages: HTML, PHP, CSS, and JavaScript, and the backend uses languages that allow storage, retrieval, and editing of information such as PHP, Ruby, Python, SQL, and Java.
What Is a Headless CMS and How Does It Work?
A headless CMS separates the front and backend so that developers can manage them separately. Developers utilizing the power of a CMS have complete control over how the data is managed and where it is stored in the backend. In a headless CMS, however, the content that is stored and managed in the backend is delivered through an API to the frontend (what your visitors see) statically. The difference between dynamic and static websites is astronomical in terms of Page Speed, which is how long a page takes to load. We’ll get more into what static for WordPress means later.
Is WordPress Headless by Default?
WordPress is not headless straight out of the box. WordPress can be bundled with their REST API to transform it into a headless CMS. Once this CMS is headless, the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) is deactivated and the REST API takes control. With a “headless CMS open source”, you aren’t limited to one frontend system, as is the case with traditional, non-headless WordPress. For example, you can use ReactJS or VueJS as a framework for your WordPress site. The use of faster, lightweight, and modern frameworks can also contribute to faster load times and easier development.
Why Headless WordPress Is Gaining So Much Popularity
Headless is a new approach to building websites. Headless WordPress was created by Automattic as a way to make WordPress more scalable, easy to work with, and faster. WordPress is a powerful CMS for building websites. It’s easy to use, and it’s open-source. The problem is that it can be difficult to scale WordPress as the site grows, and as a result, slows down.
The main goal of headless WordPress is to be able to build custom solutions that are not limited by the traditional WordPress architecture while taking advantage of WordPress’s massive developer ecosystem and easy-to-use backend. Headless WordPress also has some other benefits such as the ability to reuse code and content, increased speed, and flexibility in design.
Headless is future-proofing WordPress by adding security layers and seamless integrations with third-party services that are becoming more important to digital marketers. With headless WordPress, you can keep your website secure and speedy without losing any of the WordPress features that you know and love.
Developers and Businesses Are Using Headless WordPress, What’s Stopping You?
WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world for good reason. But it has some big limitations. We’ve already discussed some of those limitations, like speed and security. The real advantage of a headless CMS open source, like WordPress, is that you get all the power of WordPress in the backend, like plugins and themes, but you also get the performance and security benefits of a static, non-WordPress website.
It’s no secret that static websites are incredibly fast. And why shouldn’t they be? Static websites don’t rely on databases and don’t worry about plugins that bloat the frontend, clogging up the experience for your visitors. So why are millions of websites using WordPress and other CMSs that slow them down? The answer is simple. They don’t want to change the code every time a content writer adds a blog post. Before CMSs, changing a website required coding knowledge. Businesses don’t want to give up the ability to change content without making direct code edits, but they also want a website that’s fast and secure. This dilemma birthed headless. You can now have a speedy static frontend and a no-code backend. The choice is obvious.
