Introduction to Headless WordPress
What is Headless WordPress?
Headless WordPress is an architecture where WordPress serves only as a content management system (CMS) and API provider, while a separate frontend application handles the presentation layer.
In a traditional WordPress setup:
- WordPress handles both content AND display
- PHP generates HTML on the server
- Themes control the frontend appearance
In a headless setup:
- WordPress manages content through its familiar admin interface
- The REST API (or GraphQL) exposes content as JSON data
- A separate frontend (React, Next.js, Vue, etc.) fetches and displays content
Why Go Headless?
Performance Benefits
- Faster page loads – Static generation and CDN caching
- Better Core Web Vitals – React/Next.js optimizations
- Reduced server load – API calls are lightweight
Developer Experience
- Modern JavaScript stack – React, TypeScript, Tailwind
- Component-based architecture – Reusable UI components
- Better tooling – Hot reload, type checking, testing
Flexibility
- Multi-channel publishing – Same content, multiple frontends
- Custom frontend design – No theme limitations
- Scalability – Frontend and backend scale independently
When to Use Headless WordPress
✅ Good fit for:
- Content-heavy sites needing fast performance
- Teams with JavaScript/React expertise
- Projects requiring custom, complex UIs
- Multi-platform content delivery (web, mobile, IoT)
⚠️ Consider carefully for:
- Small blogs with simple needs
- Teams without JavaScript experience
- Sites heavily dependent on WordPress plugins
- Tight budgets (two systems to maintain)
What We'll Build
In this tutorial series, we'll create a complete headless WordPress blog with:
- Homepage with featured posts
- Blog archive with pagination
- Single post pages with dynamic routing
- Category filtering
- SEO optimization
- Image optimization
We'll use Next.js 14 with the App Router and TypeScript for type safety.
Prerequisites
Before starting, you should have:
- Basic knowledge of React and JavaScript/TypeScript
- Node.js 18+ installed on your machine
- A WordPress site with some content (local or hosted)
- Familiarity with the WordPress admin interface
What You'll Need
# Required tools
node --version # Should be 18+
npm --version # Should be 9+
# Optional but recommended
code --version # VS Code for developmentNext Steps
In the next lesson, we'll set up a fresh Next.js project and configure it to connect to your WordPress site's REST API.
Ready? Let's build something awesome! 🚀
