Headless WordPress Notes

It makes sense that the average customer is concerned with security of their web presence, so anything you can do that dramatically increases security can’t be a bad thing. This older article on TechRepublic does a good job overviewing what happens with a headless CMS and its benefits from a more devvy point of view. There’s also the Postlight Headless WP Starter repo on Github that I played with the other day.

But this morning I bumped into this service Shifter based in Japan that does a good job in explaining the basic advantages in a non-technical way in their copy:

• “Serverless” equates to “only on when you need it” (sounds environmentally positive).
• “Without the headaches of hosting or threats from bots and cyber villains” equates to “nothing to break into and worry about” (sounds like a painkiller).
• there’s some other stuff that is more about https and CDNs that is more generic so it’s less relevant …

The speedy aspect of static site hosting can be achieved with one of the caching solutions or static site generating plugins like this approach but it’s going to be messier that way.

The security aspect of static site hosting is laid out well by Netlify here.

• “With a static site, you don’t have to worry about malicious code being injected into your site when users visit it.”
• “There’s a reason that a normal static site hosted on a CDN is often 10 times faster time-to-first-byte than a site built with a legacy CMS.”
• and the rest of the reasons are compelling enough to make you think that you should go static if you can figure it out …

What’s the main takeaway? Seems like I need to go headless — which sounds a bit weird and scary … —JM

Related links:

• Human Made’s React Tools for WordPress
• WP Engine on Brainless vs Headless
• Netlify’s “9 Reasons Your Site Should Be Static”