Headless WordPress – Why we use it as a Headless CMS

In the Jamstack world, there are so many headless content management systems out there to choose from. From Strapi, Contentful, Sanity etc, the choices are endless. So why does Jambaree continue to work with headless WordPress?

Well, there’s a few reasons. Firstly, our agency (parent company Bare Advertising) has been around since 2009, and we’ve been delivering WordPress solutions for over 14 years. We consider ourselves to be WordPress experts, and still to this day offer WordPress sites as a lower cost option to our clients.

Secondly, we’ve pioneered the use of WordPress as a headless content management system into our stack, and have been doing this since 2018.  Let’s just say, we’ve gotten extremely good at this! When speaking to other Jamstack developers and agencies, we understand originally that the learning curve with headless WordPress was extremely high. In fact, this usually was the reason why most other developers/agencies chose to integrate other easier content management systems. Note that other content management systems can be extremely expensive. For example, Contentful has a free plan, and the next tier up is $300 USD per month! It’s not that hard to hit that second tier.

The growth of headless WordPress and GraphQL has exploded, making it much easier to integrate, and is very well supported.

Now why should you or your company use Headless WordPress with NextJS development as your content management system for your next project?

1. It’s free and open-source – As always, WordPress is open-source, and does not require monthly subscriptions or perpetual running costs.
2. Speed – Headless WordPress runs on a separate backend server, therefore the front end experience is never compromised by the size of your database, or number of pages/posts and plugins etc.
3. Ease of Use for Onboarding – Most of our clients have had some sort of exposure to WordPress in the past. Training staff to use our new Jamstack solution with headless WordPress is a snap.
4. Leverage Existing Plugins – We’ve integrated some of the most commonly used plugins such as Advanced Custom Fields, Yoast SEO, Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7 and others to our stack.
5. Most “Backend Only” Plugins Work – Backend plugins typically work “out of the box”. So if you need some sort of plugin to export posts, or a plugin to generate any sort of backend reporting etc, it will work.
6. Security – As mentioned above, the headless WordPress backend is installed on a completely separate server. This greatly reduces the chances of a hack, as the server is not exposed on the internet.
7. Scalable – As static content and data is sourced during build (and not in real time like a typical WordPress website), your website can continue to grow without any performance hits.

If you’re interesting in learning more about Headless WordPress, or would like to schedule a demo, please feel free to hit us up.