Headless CMS are quite popular at the moment. There are several advantages of using a headless CMS in terms of performance and security, which I will be discussing in another blog post.
This blog post highlights WordPress and why it is a good solution for the headless CMS feature. As a WordPress Developer, you might think I am a bit biased towards WordPress but this is my honest review.
I was doing some research around headless CMS. WordPress wasn’t my first choice. I was looking to choose a new CMS that I could use, but in the end opted to choose WordPress. Factors include cost, ease of use and customisation.
Cost
As mentioned above, WordPress was never my choice. Hence, I started to look into various CMS. I played with few.
There was one CMS that was really cool with a lot of features and content building blocks. Most of the CMSs provided trial periods too. But the combination of cost of features was not reasonable and I found it to be a bit expensive.
Running WordPress as headless CMS can be reasonably cheap with options for shared hosting or even cloud based hosting such as Amazon lightsail. This was one of the main reasons I chose to use WordPress.
In terms of building a full fledged CMS also, with WordPress it can be achieved quite easily with minimum cost.
Easy to use
There are several headless CMS, some of them are really good, if budget isn't an issue.
But I did find the good ones with lots of features, especially with content building blocks, were expensive.
With WordPress building custom content blocks is relatively easy and less expensive. These are done by adding custom fields. WordPress has a solid api for metadata to achieve this.
And there is also no limitation to it or either number of pages or posts. You can create as many blog posts you want or create as many landing pages as needed.
And most importantly, WordPress is easy to use and manage. With most of the content managers not being developer or coding background, WordPress will always have an advantage for its ease of use. As a developer with coding background I might be leaning towards a well architect CMS but the truth is cost (reason number 1) and ease of use will always be main reasons.
Ownership
One of the advantages of building the website or even headless CMS with WordPress is the complete ownership you can have.
It doesn't feel like being hosted with third parties. Things like backing up the site and database when needed or at regular intervals can be super simple tasks.
Easy deployment
There are a lot of recent developments around tech stack in WordPress. Deployments are really simple with services like Vercel or with Github actions. My personal favorite at the moment is Vercel.