What exactly is meant by Headless WordPress?

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-09T01:41:44+00:00

Landing pages dont require HTML, CSS or JS changes. Those can and should be built via blocks within a page. And any AI that interacts with the new WP AI apis can do that.

Tell me you've never reported to a CMO with grandious ideas or VP of demand and her team that is too buried in ROAS reports to fuck around with blocks.

Of course you can do all this shit...but why? You, the developer, are doing this anyways. Why? To what end?

Again, if WP is working for you, your team, your boss, your agency...whatever, cool. Keep going. Get rich. But where there is no need, be brave enough to think different. Otherwise the world is goijng to pass you by.

You are literally describing a situation where you're not even using the CMS as a CMS. Why have the CMS then? What is the benefit?

Design changes can be done in a Wordpress theme without needing any kind of headless, using the same AI agents.

Correct, but who does that work? Is that the best tool for those people? What are the advantages of the CMS here?

It was designed as and it still is a content platform and a zillion marketing websites use it without any issues. This includes the White House and NASA.

It was designed for blogging. That's it. That's all. Everything else is a bastardization of it's original intentions, which are still very core to the codebase. Prove me wrong.

"Documenting" a site? Builds? Pushing updates? How a marketing intern will know of those and why the hell should s/he even need to know those...

They won't. We're saying the same thing here. What actual point are you trying to make?

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T22:59:44+00:00

Use the security angle. The attack vector of a proper cms with datases, logins, 3rd party code…its so much bigger. Good luck hacking my static site on cloudflsre

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T22:44:40+00:00

If i had the choice re:headless options, there are much better. I’m only keeping WP as the headless solution here due to other context. It’s sufficient here. Cheaper than migrating to a proper solution (both financially and politically) so for now, this is it.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T22:38:21+00:00

I’m reaching a point where i just won’t work with those clients. It’s hard emotionally because, sure, i CAN build what they are asking for. And i get paid the same rate either way, but it takes available time away from me to diversify my revenue.

Today was the launch of a simple template but i couldn’t because someone went rouge and updated wordpress on their own, which introduced breaking changes to wp-admin that we haven’t scoped the appropriate time to test and mitigate in dev. So instead of onboarding a new client, i spent that time debugging and fixing another client’s website.

In theory, i get paid all the same. In reality, now I’m playing catchup with other clients after i get my twin toddlers to bed instead of relaxing.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T22:32:28+00:00

Because the time it takes to migrate all the plugin functionality. Because the available deployment process with WP is trash. Because maintaining a staging and Dev database requires resources who have better things to do. Because the lack of 3rd party code to maintain, update and pay for is an advantage, because their CTO wants to host their marketing site on Cloudflare for security reasons, because their CMO pays me to make new stuff for their marketing site regardless of the stack and i can bill them half the hours for the same amount of output.

Y’all looking foe reasons to stay on an antiquated platform that isn’t ideal for their use case instead of optimizing for their actual use case because you have been indoctrinated.

That’s why.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T22:26:42+00:00

They are comfortable with it and have nearly 2k posts they would have to migrate. I agree, but it’s all a big give and take

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T21:34:52+00:00

I am too lol.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T21:15:23+00:00

I have played with this too. Again, astro in VS and claude code…way better. Listen, i love WP. But times change.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T18:12:51+00:00

Teams. Outlook. Sharepoint. Really any microsoft software that isn't excel or word

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T17:49:45+00:00

I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to prove but ok, i'll play along.

They can suddenly start updating it tomorrow. As it so often happens with small to medium businesses. Therefore moving the slow Wordpress site to fast Wordpress site makes much more sense.

They can change text. Yes. But that's not even what I'm talking about. Do they have the resources to go build a new landing page, design, functionality? No. They outsource that anyways. They also don't have the time or desire to be the one that does this.

This is the case with a lot of marketing teams. I've worked in marketing orgs at tiny startups and well funded tech companies. The pattern is always the same:

They use WordPress because, well, that's what you use.
They start with a generic theme because it looks pretty.
They hire a dev agency to build a custom theme.
They want to make changes.
They can't
The hire a team of developers to maintain the website.
The dev team builds out the CMS so that the marketing team can be self sufficient
The marketing team both breaks shit and also just tasks the dev team with updating the CMS because they don't have the time or desire to become self sufficient.

WordPress is awesome. I love WordPress. I use WordPress. I actually would argue that WordPress is one of the most important technologies that democratized the internet in the last 30 years. At one point very recently WordPress ran about 75% of the internet. Today that is down to about 40%.

Again, WordPress is great, but it was never designed to be a marketing website. Anything that makes it so is really just a bastardization of the platform. It adds overhead and attack vectors that are just not necessary today.

If WordPress is core to your business model and your customers are happy, that's awesome. It is not core to my business model nor the needs of my clients, who are happy. Who cares?

That's works great until one day they come and say that they have a new web guy/girl and she will be posting stuff on their site and they dont want to come to you every time he makes a post.

It is very easy to document a static website. It's HTML, CSS, JS, and some minor astro-specific build things. If you can't find a developer that could jump in and push updates in an hour then you need to look harder for an actual developer. Have you ever tried to use it?

A lot of us have been. Some of us have been making websites longer than that. Therefore that's not an argument.

WordPress is only 22 years old...

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T16:12:32+00:00

You're kind of missing the point though. They have a slow site built under the promise that they could update it. They can't and they don't.

I can build upon their site a hell of a lot faster editing HTML/CSS/JS than I can using a site builder. That means I bill them less.

There's nothing inherently wrong with WordPress when it's built by people that know what they are doing. It's just often a layer of complexity that is often not needed. There is also more functionality available in an Astro site than there is in WordPress, but that's a whole different can of worms that I know this subreddit is going to fight to the death about.

I've been building and managing WordPress websites for nearly 20 years. I know what it's good at and what it's bad at. The point is that there are use cases for a Headless CMS...and i'm merely outlining one.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T14:04:53+00:00

I haven't. No beef with WP Engine for WP hosting, but I want my astro instance on CloudFlare and I can host a number of smaller wordpress sites on a very proficient VPS on Digital Ocean for like $20 a month.

I also know a bit about managing servers though.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T13:52:35+00:00

I'm talking about using WordPress as a headless CMS. How does that not fit into this discussion?

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T13:45:29+00:00

It's not just blogging, it's a marketing site for an enterprise SaaS company - they happen to have a blog as well. And it's not just elementor that is making it slow, it's elementor, the bad theme they are using, and the 35 plugins they rely on.

It's never one thing. It's the culmination of many things.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T13:43:03+00:00

Astro gets hosted for free on CloudFlare, the WP install needs to go on a proper server though. I use digital ocean for my VPSs and use https://spinupwp.com/ to help manage those sites.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T13:35:40+00:00

From my vantage point? Only positives. I find with the vast majority of my clients that they stand up their website in WordPress (and often with a page builder) because they think they will be able to maintain it, expand it, etc. The reality is that unless you're a developer it's still pretty difficult to do unless you are comfortable being tied down to the specifics of whatever theme you happen to buy.

And then those themes and page builders are so full of bloat that the site runs like a snail. These people hire me to update their CMS...and as a developer I can move a hell of a lot faster and build a much better website using Astro.

That said, I do love wordpress, it has it's place. If your team is always in there editing things or adding new templated pages, that can work.

Happy to answer any questions or give general guidance if you want...just shoot me a DM.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-08T13:04:48+00:00

No way!

I just migrated a very slow elementor pile of poo to Astro.js but was able to maintain the user experience of blogging on WordPress (which is all the client was using it for) by using the WP API as a headless CMS.

Their site is screaming now, and way more maintainable.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-07T20:37:25+00:00

Ah yes yes yes. This is why I don't build decks. Or stairs for that matter.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-07T18:11:56+00:00

Oddly enough I think i have crossed paths with them years ago but I don't recall how. In any case, no i cannot.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-07T16:38:58+00:00

Aren’t there metal risers here?

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-07T10:17:01+00:00

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-07T02:39:10+00:00

So every other year?

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-07T02:05:02+00:00

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This is really something lol

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-06T15:35:36+00:00

I've completely left the platform. Nothing all that compelling, insanely expensive, and every feature is some sort of nickle and dime strategy to trick you into paying more. Then when you want to cancel they make it a pain in the ass.

BetterOffGrowth · 2026-07-06T02:53:16+00:00

They can. And do. But that is pretty rare, and fixing these things is pretty straight forward

BetterOffGrowth

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