How to Create a Headless WordPress Website

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How to Create a Headless WordPress Website
You may have heard of the new trend of “Headless CMS”. Unless you are a developer, it can be difficult to unravel exactly what this term means and decide whether or not it is a viable solution for your website.

With a Headless WordPress CMS installation, you can separate the backend and frontend of your website. You can use this approach to generate static copies of your site, which makes loading times much faster.

In this post, we will introduce the concept of headless CMS and how it works. Then we will show you how to implement a basic setup that uses static copies of your website via Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Let's get the ball rolling!

Table of Contents view
What is a headless CMS?
Before we dive into headless WordPress, let’s explore what a egypt phone number data CMS is in general. First, it’s important to clarify the term “ CMS ” itself. A Content Management System (CMS) is a complete solution for creating and managing online content (like WordPress). It can be compared to simpler platforms like website builders, which are easier to use but also less flexible.

What about the “headless” part of the term? All websites are made up of a front end, which is the graphical part of the site that users see, and a back end. The back end controls how the website’s data is managed and stored, and is where you’ll make customizations, add content, modify elements via code, and so on.

In any case, headless architecture cuts out the front end, or “head,” of the platform. By separating the front end from the back end, you can manage both separately. This allows you to easily move content from one platform to another. For example, a headless CMS could push new content to your company’s website, Google Calendar, and Facebook all at the same time.

You may be wondering how this relates to your WordPress website . While WordPress was not initially intended to be a headless CMS, its development has moved in that direction in recent years. This allows you to keep your current WordPress site and take advantage of the latest technological advances.

In 2016, WordPress developers created the REST API , giving users the ability to make their WordPress CMS headless. Almost all WordPress themes can be made headless using this technique. With headless WordPress, the ' What You See Is What You Get' ('WYSIWYG') editor is disabled and key functions are instead handled via the REST API .

By default, WordPress is not headless, as it uses a traditional architecture that combines the front-end and back-end. This is not necessarily a problem. You can use the built-in block editor to make custom changes. However, there are several reasons to consider using headless WordPress.

Introduction to headless WordPress
Typically, when you make changes to your site on the backend (or admin dashboard), you see the corresponding results on the frontend (i.e. the live pages that visitors have access to). In this traditional model, WordPress serves both the backend and the frontend of your website.

When we talk about headless WordPress, we are referring to an installation where you are not using WordPress to generate the front-end of your site. WordPress only acts as a back-end. For the front-end, you can use any other platform that connects to the CMS via its API or set up a static website.

For this article, we will be working with a static WordPress installation for the front end. The two main advantages of this methodology are:

Static websites are highly secure as there are no moving parts for hackers to take advantage of.
Non-dynamic pages load much faster because they don’t have to pull information from databases or load scripts. Of course, another way to achieve this is with WordPress page caching .
In theory, a static WordPress installation could also save you money on hosting since you could get away with using a less powerful server.

However, this is not an approach that works for all types of projects. For example, with this solution, it is more complicated to include dynamic elements such as contact forms or search on the site ( although it is possible, with the right configuration ).