The Headless CMS Pattern

WordPress powers 43% of the web. It is the most battle-tested content management system ever built. It also ships with a PHP frontend that is slow, bloated, and increasingly irrelevant. We use WordPress every day. We never use its frontend. What Headless WordPress Means A headless CMS is a content management system where the admin interface (where you write and manage content) is completely separated from the frontend (what visitors see). The CMS provides content through an API. A separate application — in our case, a custom single-page application — fetches that content and renders it. WordPress has shipped with a full REST API since version 4.7 (2016). Every post, page, category, media item, and custom field is available as JSON at /wp-json/wp/v2/. Most WordPress sites never use this. They render pages server-side through PHP templates, Elementor blocks, or page builders that generate HTML on every request. We do the opposite. WordPress handles content creation — the editor, media li