Headless WordPress - Should you use it?

In this episode Steffen and Dominik are discussing headless and static WordPress, explaining the motivations behind using a static site generator over a traditional PHP server. While they acknowledge the hype around headless systems, they emphasizes that the need for static sites is often more important and that there are tools available, both WordPress-specific and general, to generate static sites.

Highlights
00:00 Intro
01:11 Static WordPress
03:50 Headless WordPress
06:16 Making a WordPress website static
09:46 Concept & advantages of a headless website
12:40 Data modeling in WordPress
16:11 Challenges with headless
18:55 Advantages of headless
33:38 Should you go headless?

Links

[Steve-Ariss]

Really great talk. Like all tools, what you choose depends on what's best for the task at hand. "Headless" Wordpress is severe overkill for a lot of jobs but it has its benefits in certain scenarios which you outlined nicely. Don't drink the cool-aid kids, just write good code

[minimo_io]

Great content. Another use case is when you already have, say a Woocommerce site (with editors used to the admin interface) but need more control on the rendering side.

[dopetag]

Actually, it was really on point! Thanks for this discussion

[uncountableuk]

Very nice discussion. Really enjoyed the deep dive.

One thing that I would like is to be able to have wordpress front end consume a wordpress backend.

So a kind of wp_query that called an API rather than mysql, but mapped exactly the same fields.

I find updating even a small site very hard with wordpress. The database holds both content and display functionality and is almost impossible to merge.

The lack of version control on WP would matter less in that case also. I could just take backups of the front end logic during development and version control those.

[Dorlonf]

Hi guys!
So I have a potential client for which I am going to prepare a custom website. Since I would like to make it really unique and fast I decided to try going with headless WordPress and NextJS.

If I may ask, what would be your advice regarding architecture of such solution? To be precise, will it be a good idea to deploy both WordPress and NextJS on the same VPS (Digital Ocean here) and run nextjs on default port while WordPress would be available on a different one with nginx config? Because I am not sure how to combine both as WordPress needs to be available somewhere to consume its API.

[nuborn.studio]

So for me I am a huge fan of great UI/UX design in any client project. Therefore I am building frontends based on js frameworks, simply because i have no limitations. But, depending on the project of course, i want a client to be able to edit stuff. Headless WP/WooCommerce is my go-to in such a scenario. The only thing bothering me is the eco-system incompatibility. Its a tradeoff between user experience and the clients ability to have complete control.

[imsavage]

is headless wp better then shopify for e-commerce?

[FZ-DEV]

is better headless for simple website(showcase, landing, portfolio and personal blog) instead of installing themes and plugins for frontend.... only call wp's api or create a simple server to save json data into files then fetch it from frontend..., for some purpose headless is good choice with wordpress esp if you dont want to west time to build backend from scratch

[yucelmutlusoy]

There is no point of headless WP, if you prefer headless setup please consider something like Strapi, Payload etc. Or have a very clean WordPress setup with proper hosting and clean architecture.

[micazev]

"if u come from the other side" 😂