Headless WordPress examples: What you don’t know about its limitations

The buzz around headless WordPress is definitely growing, and for good reason! The idea of decoupling the content management side of WordPress from the front-end rendering opens up exciting possibilities for the application's flexibility and a truly modern API-first approach to building.

If you’ve been browsing Headless WordPress examples online, you’ve probably seen sleek websites, lightning-fast front-ends, and developer-first setups that look incredibly appealing. But before you dive in headfirst, it’s important to take a step back.

While a headless setup is very tempting, especially for developers who want more control, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, particularly in the WordPress ecosystem.

There are definitely some tradeoffs to consider, from plugin compatibility to SEO challenges. Along the way, I’ll also explore compelling WordPress alternatives that might offer a smoother ride depending on your use case.

At its core, Headless WordPress refactors the platform's basic architecture. When someone visits your regular WordPress site, it fetches the content and displays it immediately using the built-in design system (your theme).

This is not the case with headless WP. Instead of displaying that content directly through the theme, headless WP exposes all the information through a set of digital channels called APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

With Headless WP, you can use modern web technologies like React, Vue.js, or Next.js, and even integrate with Flutter or React Native mobile applications. This front-end application talks to the WordPress API, gets the content it needs, and then decides exactly how to display that content.

In this way, WordPress becomes a content center, and your front-end is free to use the latest and greatest front-end development tools to fetch content as needed.

Headless WP often comes in handy in situations where a traditional, tightly coupled WordPress setup may not be up to the task. Here are some common cases where headless WP is often touted as the ideal solution:

These examples show how WordPress companies are using a headless approach in production, along with some of the headaches they’ve encountered.

TechCrunch experimented with a headless WordPress site to improve flexibility and performance. But they hit friction when plugin-based features (like comments and SEO metadata) didn’t transfer cleanly to the custom front-end. For instance, managing SEO with headless WP often requires additional setup. A practical example is integrating Yoast SEO with Next.js, as demonstrated in this tutorial:

Frontity was a React framework built for headless WP, praised for its performance. But when Automattic acquired it, WordPress development was paused, and users were left in limbo. It highlighted the risks of relying on niche tooling within the headless WP space.

They built a beautiful React front-end powered by WordPress content. But behind the scenes, development teams had to reimplement core site features because those WordPress plugins didn’t work headlessly.

Let's take a look at some of the challenges you may encounter on a headless WordPress website. While the benefits are enticing, it's crucial for beginners to understand the limitations before getting started:

WordPress thrives on its vast ecosystem of plugins. Many popular plugins are tightly integrated with the traditional WordPress visual layer ( WordPress theme), providing features such as contact forms, search engine optimization tools, e-commerce functionality, and visual builders. In a headless setup, these front-end dependent features often break or require significant custom development to replicate on a decoupled front-end.

Take WooCommerce, for instance, a popular WordPress plugin to set up an e-commerce store. WooCommerce's core functionalities still rely heavily on the WordPress backend for crucial e-commerce logic. You'll encounter challenges when trying to implement features that have traditionally relied on tight integration between the front-end and the back-end.

If the WordPress API endpoints aren't optimized for heavy traffic, API response times can increase dramatically. This will result in slow-loading product pages, frustrated users, and potentially lost sales.

Building and maintaining a standalone front-end application can add significant complexity to development. It requires a team that is well-versed in modern front-end frameworks and can handle data fetching, state management, and routing independently of WordPress' built-in mechanisms.

Find out more: Why developers love to hate WordPress

With a headless WP setup, achieving true content model flexibility for content types such as recipes or events can still be a challenge. The basic WordPress content model revolves around posts and pages. While these are flexible up to a certain extent, they may not provide the structured fields needed for complex content types such as recipes (ingredients, cooking time, steps) or events (date, time, location, host).

Your decoupled frontend relies heavily on the stability and consistency of the WordPress API. If a WordPress plugin is updated and accidentally changes the data structure returned by a custom API endpoint, front-end applications that rely on that structure may suddenly start displaying errors.

Learn more: API limitations

Managing two separate codebases inevitably adds complexity to development and operations workflows. Updates to one system may require corresponding adjustments to the other to ensure compatibility and feature continuity.

Consider a high-traffic e-commerce site built with a React front-end and a headless WordPress/WooCommerce back-end. They diligently updated their React front-end libraries but neglected to regularly update their WordPress installation and outdated WooCommerce plugin, figuring that since it was “just” the back-end, it wouldn't be a target.

One day, a known vulnerability in the outdated WooCommerce plugin was exploited, and an attacker was able to access sensitive customer data stored in the WordPress database. While the front-end itself was not directly attacked, the back-end vulnerability powering the front-end had serious consequences for the organization and its customers.

While Headless WP offers a pathway to decoupling, the challenges we've discussed also highlight the fact that it often takes a great deal of effort to integrate traditionally coupled systems into the modern decoupling paradigm.

Fortunately, the content management system landscape has changed, and there are now a number of purpose-designed headless CMSs like BCMS, Directus, Strapi, Sveltia CMS, available that have been designed from the ground up to address modern web development workflows and developer needs. These platforms often address many of the limitations we see on headless WP.

BCMS is a modern open-source headless content management system, built with a focus on developer experience and structured content. For many modern projects, migrating from legacy WordPress to BCMS may be a better solution for the following reasons:

Truly decoupled architecture:

BCMS was designed from the ground up to be a backend content API. There are no legacy theme systems to address or disable. This results in cleaner separation of concerns and a more predictable API.

Intuitive content modeling:

BCMS provides a user-friendly interface for defining the structure of content (e.g., blog posts, products, or events) with specific data types (text, images, relationships, etc.).

This structured approach ensures data consistency and makes it easier for developers to consume and render content on the front end. This is often more straightforward than managing custom fields in WordPress.

Developer-friendly features: The BCMS CLI makes it easy for developers to create new applications with the preferred framework of choice, such as Next, Nuxt, Svelte, or Astro.

Designed for modern front-ends:

BCMS is designed to work seamlessly with modern JavaScript frameworks and static site generators, often providing better integration than headless WP. BCMS offers framework-specific components like Vue, Svelte, and React components for smooth integration.

Webhook support:

BCMS facilitates modern CI/CD workflows with built-in Webhook support that triggers automatic builds or other actions when content changes.

Media Management with CDN:

BCMS includes integrated media management with CDN functionality, ensuring optimal delivery of images and other assets to the front end without the need for a separate plugin or CDN configuration.

Reduced maintenance costs: With BCMS Pro, you get a cloud-hosted CMS that’s ready to use without any hassle. Using a dedicated headless content management system reduces the overall maintenance burden by eliminating the need to maintain a traditional WordPress installation.

Focus on performance: As a headless CMS, BCMS is architected with API delivery performance in mind.

Many modern projects require high performance and flexible content modeling. In this case, it's more efficient to choose a dedicated headless content management system like BCMS.

This is often better than dealing with the inherent limitations of a headless WordPress setup. A dedicated headless CMS allows developers to use the best tools available in both the backend and frontend. This way, there are no compromises like with a traditional monolithic system like WordPress.