Streamlining Website Management with Headless WordPress

With all of the technology available on the market today, there are endless choices. With every new CMO comes a new preferred CMS that throws your marketing team into disarray. New dashboards, new content silos, different keyword strategies, and a ton of friction as they need to get acclimated with how it all works.

Can they preview before they publish? How does scheduling work, and what timezone is it referencing for the publishing time?

Where can they update the Open Graph image? What about the meta description and titles? Ah, right, those are now controlled via the tabs on the right, rather than the Yoast plugin at the bottom.

As a developer that has worked in almost every ecosystem, we hear it all the time.

What I’ve come to discover: there’s something to be said for keeping things consistent.

What has changed? 

CMS builds have come a long way in a couple of decades. We saw the advent of the CMS at scale with PHP-based systems in the early 2000s, and we’ve had nothing but exponential progress since the earliest systems in the market

With that in mind, how do you keep internal website processes the same when the tech that they’re built on is changing so rapidly? 

Many modern ecosystems have moved away from monolithic infrastructure. Large corporations in particular have taken what’s called a “Headless” approach. Rather than expecting one platform to do everything, they instead break their software into streamlined components. 

• Frontend frameworks, primarily built in JavaScript, to manage user experience
• Headless CMS platforms to manage the experience of creating and managing content for internal team members
• CRMs or newsletters for handling client communications and pipeline management. 
• Analytics platforms like Segment, GA4, etc. to provide executives, marketing, and sales teams with integral user data

And so many more uses. 

WordPress in particular is a platform that has taken a bit of a reputational hit, in part because its open-source nature allowed users to build out a plugin-based ecosystem that made it nigh-unmaintainable.

It's often criticized, largely due to the plugin bloat that compromises maintainability. Many sites become unwieldy with countless plugins for page builders, caching, security, SEO, and more. This "plugin hell" is what turns many marketers away.

How do we maintain internal consistency?

WordPress, despite the challenges, remains the undisputed CMS leader. Marketers are accustomed to it, and its tools excel for content management.

When it comes to RFPs, the verbiage isn’t so much, “Which CMS should we use”, as it is, “WordPress or not WordPress?”.

Depending on the marketing manager, they either love it or want to get as far away from it as humanly possible.

In most instances of it being the latter, it’s usually due to what could be considered a poor implementation.

As mentioned above, any dislike is usually something to do with the maintenance nightmare of 20 plugins being out-of-date at any given time, site outages with little rhyme or reason, security breaches due to some combination of negligence, hosting, and technological malfunction, or a host of other issues that come along with poor WordPress development standards. 

The best of both worlds

Modern tech stacks are decoupled - companies are using the best tool for each job, rather than attempting to build out their own Swiss Army Knife to do a little bit of everything.  

With the rate of growth in the tech industry, having a platform that can easily swap parts in and out is integral in long-term success. 

WordPress has been, and continues to be, the market leader in content management systems. Marketing and non-developer team members are used to it, and the toolset built into the platform - particularly with the Gutenberg enhancements they’ve made - makes content management simple and straightforward. 

In the past, efforts have been made, some with a bit of success, to utilize WordPress as a headless CMS. This is painting those efforts with a broad brush, but many of those instances felt fairly ‘jerry-rigged’. And even when they worked, they were missing some key components, such as the ability for some of the bigger plugins like Yoast or Advanced Custom Fields to integrate properly.

Those days have come and gone.

In the last ~12 months, WP Engine has made tremendous strides in launching dedicated Headless WordPress services, meaning we are now developing platforms with Javascript-based frontends, and decoupled WordPress content management backends.

Atlas is WP Engine’s dedicated Headless hosting service, and they’ve built out a brand new JavaScript framework by the name of Faust.js - having those two has empowered developers to help companies continue to utilize WordPress to enable their sales and marketing teams, while removing the encumbrance of the security concerns, speed issues, and maintenance headaches that come with the WordPress monolithic architecture. 

With their purchase of Delicious Brains, it opened up the doors for them to redevelop the Advanced Custom Fields plugin - one that is found in almost all great WordPress builds - into software that slots in perfectly to a Headless ecosystem.

The writing is on the wall - with other WordPress plugin giants like Yoast getting into the headless market, we’re well on our way to this type of build being more commonplace for years to come as WordPress continues its market dominance. 

This isn’t the only way 

To be clear, every client needs something a little different. 

At our agency, we have a strong WordPress background, combined with a talented team of developers that has made tremendous strides in the Headless space, having built websites with frontend frameworks like NextJS, Sveltekit, and content management systems like Prismic, Sanity, Strapi, and more. 

For each potential project, we ensure that our offerings are a good balance of client preference alongside best practices.

Being a partner of WP Engine, we are huge fans of the direction they’ve been taking. Seeing the way the current is changing and making big moves to accommodate modern tech is a tremendous challenge, and they’ve shown that they’re up to it. 

Not only that, with them being the market leader in everything pertaining to WordPress offerings - whether it’s the best plugins available, top tier hosting, or general knowledge - they’re best positioned to ensure that their Atlas and Faust.js Headless offerings are sustainable for years to come. 

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