Not wordpress

Wordpress sites make up 43.5% of the websites on the internet

or 478 million websites created in wordpress.

It is a goliath of the internet.

It is a content management system that allows non or less technical people to quickly and easily create a website, add a template, add some content and be live on the web.

It’s incredibly powerful when you use the plethora of plugins available to add all sorts of functionality, ecommerce, news boards, image hosting, blogging etc.

But this ease of use comes with some trade offs, its harder to customise and make it exactly as you need it as your tied into the wordpress way of doing things.

Malware is also a constant battle, mis configuration or plugins can infect and inject malicous code into your wordpress instance. It is also immensly popular and with that comes a lot of malicous actors looking to hack unsecured systems, along with bots that automatically scrape the internet looking for vulnerabilities. These problems are not specific to wordpress alone but they are common due to its popularity and ease of use by less experience developers.

Using one of the many great plugins in the wordpress eco-system can greatly speed up the time to develop and go live with a sophisticated website, the problems comes when you are looking to add additional features that are not supported, you then have to build something from scratch that integrates nicely with wordpress or reverse engineer an existing plugin assuming it is open source.

Headless CMS

A headless cms is a content management system that unlike wordpress is not all in one system, it does not provide a way to create a fully functioning website with a backend and a templated front end. In this case the head is the frontend or the UI of your application, a headless CMS allows you to manage your content and gives you the flexibility to render it yourself.

Say you have a sophisticated wordpress website, it’s extremely popular and you want to add a mobile application to accompany your website, you will need to do a ton of work to extract the data in your wordpress site to create an api for your mobile application. With a headless CMS your data is already seperated from your UI via an api and make adding another UI (a mobile app) much easier.

It also creates a nice seperation of concerns, if you need to change some part of your UI or your CMS, making the change shouldn’t affect the other. A seperation of concerns gives you more confidence when making changes to your system as you can limit the potential blast radius of any issues you may have introduced to the system.

Payload CMS

Payload cms is a headless CMS that provides an easy way to configure and deploy it, as well as an admin interface allowing users easy access to update and add new data. It also has features to help store and use media assets, advanced text editing, an API to access the data and the ability to easily extend it when needed.

Unlike wordpress it is not suitable for non-technical folks as it requires deploying and configuring a database and integrating the api with your front end.

A headless CMS is much more flexible than wordpress and accessible to other developers as it is well documented and easy to understand primitives and doesn’t require specific framework knowledge like wordpress.

Migrating an existing website is not as scary as it sounds, there is a detailed article to help on the payload website.

Ultimately a headless CMS provides a better developer experience and more flexibility around the options we can provide to clients.