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

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 development

Next 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! 🚀