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The chances are, I don’t need to tell you about the benefits of using WordPress as the content management system for your website.

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It’s straightforward, familiar and easy to use.

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With web technologies advancing quickly as ever, there’s a new way to use WordPress that you should be considering.

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You may have heard of the following phrases:

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These are similar terms for pretty much the same thing.

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Headless or decoupled, the strategy is to detach the WordPress back end from the front end.

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Bringing with it the best of both worlds for those that want to serve a modern front end and manage their content within WordPress.

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In this article, I’ll explain what headless WordPress is and why you might want to use it for your next project.

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What Is A Headless Content Management System?

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Before we look at headless WordPress specifically, we need to think about headless CMS methodology in general.

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A headless architecture approach makes no assumptions about the presentation layer. In other words, the back end does not care about the front end.

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The CMS is built to create content, store content and serve it as an API.

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The API (Application Programming Interface) acts as the bridge between the two pieces of software (back end and front end), allowing them to communicate.

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This allows a PHP back end to interact with a JavaScript front end, for example. This being the typical reason you’d want to consider a headless approach.

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A separation of concerns between the back end and front end of your web project can be beneficial because:

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  1. You can change one without having to change the other, leaving each to evolve at their own pace. This can lead to faster development overall.
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  2. It’s possible to appropriately source and place-specific expertise within your development team.
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  3. Separating your codebase into two repositories makes it easier to implement tests, deployment pipelines and to revert changes should something go wrong.
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In summary, a headless content management system has the following traits:

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So How Does Headless WordPress Work?

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Relating this approach to WordPress; the overall premise of a headless WordPress project is to utilise the REST API.

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The REST API was introduced to WordPress core in December 2015 as a way to extend the classic usage of the CMS.

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It allows external websites and applications to interact with the CMS remotely via JSON objects.

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WordPress core includes endpoints of data for much of the default data sets. For instance, posts and pages.

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You can further customise the API depending on your projects’ requirements.

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Technically, this can be done using existing plugins or by creating a custom plugin.

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A purpose-built headless WordPress plugin could bring the following to your API:

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From a development point of view, the REST API allows you to use WordPress in a more modern, resilient, scalable, secure and performant way.

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From a content editor’s perspective, the REST API is a gateway to the content you have in your WordPress admin panel.

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It allows your data to be consumed by any type of (and number of) channel(s).

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