How Headless WordPress can modernize your site while keeping the platform you know and love.
WordPress is a name that undoubtedly carries a ton of weight. Not only is it one of the most mature Content Management Systems on the web today, it's still one of the most popular. According to statistics from Colorlib, 43% of all websites on the internet use WordPress. That's over 810 million websites! However there are some parts of WordPress that are starting to show their age, and the modern web has a lot to offer in terms of a better customer experience. While many companies have opted to completely rebuild their websites from the ground up on other platforms, this comes with a significant cost. On top of having to transfer over all of your content, you also have to re-train staff on a new dashboard. Is there a way to leverage modern web tools and frameworks while keeping the content management experience WordPress is famous for? It turns out, there is, and it's called Headless WordPress.
First, we should talk about how WordPress works. WordPress is a Content Management System, or CMS for short. It's designed to take in pages, posts, photos, products and other custom post types and display them to a user in a way that is defined by your theme. When a user requests a page from your site, WordPress will get the content needed to show that page, insert the content into your active theme, and then send the generated webpage back to the user. This is what allows you to change themes without having to rebuild your whole site. The theme acts as a template for the content entered into the WordPress dashboard. This is called a "Headful" CMS, because the WordPress content (body) is used to produce and display a page (head).
With the basic model for WordPress laid out, we can now talk about a "Headless" CMS. Unlike standard WordPress where the body and head are both managed by itself, Headless WordPress is designed to serve only as a central place for curating content. Instead of putting the content into a theme and serving the page to the user, Headless WordPress serves the content only. This content is usually served in a way that can be understood securely in code. This way, other software such as a webapp or mobile app, can read the content from WordPress directly.
Headless WordPress has several benefits. First and foremost, you can build an entirely new website while keeping all of your content and the familiar WordPress Dashboard experience. No need to fuss with new interfaces or copying over data, saving you and your business time and money. By decoupling the content from the pages, you also have a lot of freedom in how you serve your content to your users. One of my clients had multiple stores, and wanted a unique website for each of their stores. At the same time, they also wanted all of the inventory from both stores to be visible on both sites. With a Headful setup, this would mean you would need to keep 2 sites and 2 copies of store inventory up to date at all times, however with a Headless setup, you can host 2 customer facing websites that pull content from the same place. This means only 1 set of inventory needs to be kept up to date, and content only needs to be entered once to appear on both sites. Content can also be separated to appear on only specified sites if needed, giving you ultimate flexibility.
You can think of Headless WordPress, as a centralized point for multiple sales channels, and allowing you to scale by adding channels as needed. The modern age of ecommerce can be challenging for small businesses, especially when sales are happening through many different channels. Centralizing all of your sales channels to a single place not only makes things easier to manage for your business, but it also helps make a more consistent experience for your customers. Leveraging a Headless setup to centralize sales channels means customer profiles stay consistent no matter how your customers chose to do business with you. Product availability isn't fragmented across multiple places. Leveraging Headless WordPress can unify your sales process, and communication with your customers.
Yes! If you already have an established and refined web presence being served by WordPress, but want to take advantage of the benefits of centralizing your sales channels, you can opt for a hybrid approach, sometimes called a "Decoupled CMS". In this setup, WordPress continues to serve pages as usual, but also makes the raw post content available to be used by other sales channels. This could be a mobile app, web app, or point of sale system. This is a great option if you want to dip your toes in the water, or if you want to implement a fully Headless CMS in the future.
The process varies heavily depending on the needs of your site, sales channels, and your business. The first step is usually to install a theme that takes away all of the pages WordPress usually serves, and implements locations to access your content with code. From there, your web presence and sales channels can be connected. Due to the varying range of scope, it's usually best to talk with an experienced developer to get an idea of the work involved. If you're curious about learning more, or want to get an idea of the work involved, get in touch! I'd love to learn more about your business, and we can explore how Headless WordPress can work for you.