WordPress is undoubtedly the most prevalent CMS in the world, as 43.5% of all websites use it as their CMS. Primarily used to build websites, it is often compared with headless solutions. This chapter will examine whether headless CMS or WordPress is better for your project.
What is a CMS
Content management systems (CMS) allow users to create, manage, and publish digital content on various platforms. Invented in the mid-1990s, CMSs were primarily built to manage website content. Vignette and Documentum were the prevalent platforms in the early days. By the early 2000s, platforms like WordPress and Drupal had started to rise and remain the major players in the CMS market.
The next phase came about in the early 2010s when mobile devices and smartphones became popular. Enter headless CMS, a new system that offers a different kind of flexibility. It decouples the frontend from the backend and uses APIs to fetch data to solve the problem of multichannel content distribution.
WordPress: An overview
Currently, over 43% of all websites use WordPress as their CMS, holding nearly 65% of the global CMS market share. WordPress is the go-to choice for many first-timers who want to build a website. It is mostly renowned for the following:
- Easy to start: WordPress is easy to install, and its free tier offers enough features to get a site up and running. Thanks to its large community, you can easily find answers to any questions you have.
- User-friendly for non-techies: WordPress' built-in theme allows even a beginner to create a website without coding using its graphical interface. It also has many plugins for easily managing different aspects, such as SEO (Yoast SEO) and eCommerce(WooCommerce).
The problem, however, is that WordPress contains many disadvantages of a traditional CMS, especially when your use case gets more complicated. Previously, we examined the disadvantages of WordPress in detail, and here's a quick recap:
- Compromised security: WordPress faces frequent security issues due to its open-source nature and high popularity. With many available plugins and themes from varied sources, vulnerabilities often emerge, making constant updates crucial.
- High maintenance: Keeping a WordPress site functional requires frequent attention, from updating plugins and themes to custom solutions that patch CMS limitations. Many organizations invest heavily in these ongoing adjustments, limiting innovation and draining resources.
- Plugin dependency: WordPress relies on plugins for extended features, even in headless setups, where plugins help manage backend tasks. In contrast, headless CMSs often use pre-built integrations, offering cleaner, simpler solutions without regular plugin maintenance.
- High cost of maintenance: Maintenance costs add up quickly with WordPress. Free plugins and themes seem more affordable. Still, as needs grow, businesses often upgrade to paid versions, invest in robust hosting, and address stability issues after updates—all of which add up over time.
- Slower page speed: WordPress’s traditional server-side setup and numerous plugins can slow site performance. Each plugin and server-side operation adds load time, impacting SEO and user experience. Headless CMS options are often optimized for speed, leveraging frontend frameworks that support faster loading times.
- Limited design flexibility: Design flexibility in WordPress can be restrictive unless plugins like Elementor are used, which still limits users to preset options. A headless CMS offers a broader design palette, supporting diverse tech stacks without tying users to WordPress-specific tools.
- Platform lock-in and rigidity: WordPress lacks built-in flexibility, making it challenging to adapt quickly to new trends or add omnichannel capabilities. Many businesses find a headless CMS or composable stack provides the adaptability needed to deliver content across various digital platforms in real time.
- Challenging developer experience: Developing WordPress requires knowledge of its specific codebase, which many developers find limiting. Headless CMS platforms support a range of tech stacks, letting developers work with familiar tools and efficiently integrate third-party services.
- Limited collaboration: WordPress limits simultaneous editing by multiple users on the same page, unlike headless CMSs, where collaborative editing is often a native feature. This ability to handle multiple editors enhances team productivity and speeds up content production timelines.
Why is headless CMS better than traditional WordPress
You can reuse the content as components
WordPress is essentially a page builder. Your content is created around the pages you build, and you can't reuse them. Likewise, when updating content, if you have the same content in several places inside the CMS, you will need to update it everywhere. By contrast, headless' modular approach allows the creation of predefined and reusable components, which can be used to build dynamic content creation forms.
Create your own frontend with flexibility
As a result of WordPress' built-in templates, you are forced to create content around them, limiting your creativity. Headless CMS’ decoupled architecture allows you to build frontend as you want, with any technology of your choice, offering you better control over user experience.
Seamless integrations instead of plugins
Modern tech stacks often require integration with multiple services and tools, like CRM, analytics, and personalization platforms. A headless CMS is built for integration, making it easier to connect with other services via APIs, whereas WordPress often relies on plugins, which can become unmanageable and slow down performance.
Why you shouldn’t use WordPress as headless CMS
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 has 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.
When is a headless CMS the right choice?
Despite WordPress's comfort zone, moving to headless enables you to get more out of your content with less investment and maintenance. You should definitely be using a headless CMS if you have one of these use cases.
WordPress users are increasingly migrating to these superior alternatives. You can find our tutorial on how to calculate the total cost of ownership for a CMS here if you're interested in estimating the ROI of moving to a headless CMS. Refer to this migration guide or get in touch directly if you're interested in switching from WordPress to Hygraph headless CMS.