Headless CMS vs WordPress: Which Is Better & When to Use Each
At its core, a Content Management System (CMS) setup provides the ability to publish content as easily as possible. But, different teams have different requirements, nature of content to publish, budget, team-size, timelines and priorities.
Keeping this mind, here’s the single question this post tries to answer:
With all of the aspects listed above in consideration, how does headless CMS compare to WordPress?
And, here’s the TLDR summary of the comparison:
1. Key difference in approach
WordPress and headless CMS products have a fundamental difference in how they work. And understanding this difference helps us choose what is right fit for our need.
A CMS setup has three components in general:
- The website (or frontend) where the published content appears.
- The adminitration site from where the content is managed and published.
- The underlying database where all the content and setup is stored.
WordPress incorporates the above three components into a single system.
In contrast, a headless CMS only includes the administration site and the underlying database. It requires the website (or frontend) to be built separately.
Because a headless CMS requires the website to be built outside the CMS, it is known as “headless”. And this architectural change leads to a change in:
- How flexible the website can be.
- Time and effort needed to build the website.
- Coding effort or developer dependency.
- Security of the CMS setup and loading performance of the website.
Let’s evaluate each of these factors to understand what works better when.
2. Website Flexibility Headless CMS 🥇
In a traditional WordPress setup, WordPress serves the website. As a result, the website has to be built based on WordPress features, capabilities, plugins and themes. For example, building rich interactive SPAs (Single Page Apps) with WordPress is not possible.
In constrast, a headless CMS setup does not govern the website aspects. The website in a headless CMS setup can be based on any tech stack. It can then use libraries and features specific to that tech stack and leverage strengths of that tech stack.
As a result, websites in a headless CMS setup can be a lot more flexible than WordPress websites.
3. Leveraging Modern Standards and Tooling Headless CMS 🥇
The last decade has seen a lot of new development in the frontend ecosystem. This includes:
- SPAs (Single Page Apps) with rich interactive experiences
- Serverless deployment capabilities
- Site generation strategies
A WordPress based setup does not allow leveraging any of these capabilities. But, a headless CMS setup allows using modern frontend frameworks that can leverage these modern tooling capabilities.
4. Tech Skills and Resources WordPress 🥇
A large ecosystem of WordPress plugins and themes lets anyone add advance features without writing a single line of code.
In contrast, headless CMS requires a custom frontend that require coding skills. Also, making custom frontends fast, secure and SEO compliant often requires someone with solid frontend tech skillset.
So, setups that are limited on tech skills and resources should prefer WordPress over headless CMS setup.
5. Time, Effort and Budget WordPress 🥇
With readily available plugins, themes and features, WordPress setup can provide a quick turnaround. In contrast, custom development for headless CMS setups can often take weeks for equivalent implementations.
As a result, a team should choose a headless CMS setup only when time, effort and budget are all available. For smaller experiments that demand quicker turn-around, a WordPress based setup is often a decent start. And, as things mature - the setup can be migrated to a headless CMS solution.
6. Website Performance Headless CMS 🥇
WordPress websites are fast by default. But their performance can degrade due to inefficient themes or plugins. While plugins offer powerful flexibility for non-developers, this ease of use has a downside. The ability for anyone to easily add plugins makes WordPress sites more susceptible to performance problems.
In contrast, headless CMS websites are custom-built from the ground up. This allows developers to optimize for speed and scalability. Such websites can benefit from modern framework to optimize performance and deployment architectures (e.g. - serverless). The inability for anyone to add plugins also reduces the chances of inadvertant performance issues. A word of caution - building fast websites often requires seasoned frontend developers.
So, setups that seek to prioritize speed and benefit from modern deployment capabilities should opt for a headless CMS.
7. SEO Compliance WordPress 🥇 Headless CMS 🥇
WordPress ecosystem has a large number of SEO specific plugins. From ensuring right meta-tags to adding image descriptions - things can be executed fast with the right plugin. This makes building SEO compliant websites with WordPress easier than with any other CMS product. In fact, a solid SEO plugin may often do a better SEO implementation job than an inexperienced frontend developer.
When building a custom website for a headless CMS, SEO implementation requires more expertise. While SEO implementation can be customized and optimized to cater specific website needs, it often requires a seasoned frontend developer to ensure proper execution.
8. CMS Setup Security Headless CMS 🥇
WordPress setups are secure by default. But they are more prone to security risks because of the following reasons:
- Because of the popularity of WordPress, it is a frequent target of attackers looking to exploit common vulnerabilities.
- Failure to actively update WordPress core, themes and plugins can leave the setup vulnerable to newly identified security threats.
- The ease with which anyone can add a poorly coded plugin can inadvertantly open door to security risks.
In contrast, a headless CMS setup is inherently more secure because the public facing website is not part of the CMS setup. As a result, the CMS setup can be isolated by hiding it behind a firewall or a VPN. This isolation significantly reduces the attack surface, making the overall setup easier to secure.
9. WYSIWYG Content Publishing WordPress 🥇
With WordPress, the website and content entry is controlled by a single system. As a result, it allows content creation using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. This editor not only allows content input but also provides control over styling. This is a powerful capability for non-technical users to quickly make styling changes.
In contrast, all the website styling in a headless CMS is controlled in the frontend code. Therefore, any new styling change often requires code update from a developer. This makes the turnaround time on such changes longer than that on a WordPress based setup.
For teams that want to control the styling via CMS, a WordPress based setup is a better choice. Opting for headless CMS setup requires pre-building multiple style variants, which involves substantial coding effort.
10. Plugin Ecosystem WordPress 🥇
For decades, WordPress has been the most dominant CMS to build websites. As of April 2025, about 43% of the world’s websites run on WordPress. WordPress ecosystem has 65k+ plugins and 10k+ themes.
In contrast, the headless CMS market is fragmented with a large number of CMS products. Most of these headless CMS products have a few hundred plugins and themes.
With such a large ecosystem, the chances of finding a readily available theme or a plugin to extend website capabilities are higher with WordPress than with any headless CMS. So, setups prioritizing quick turn-around by reusing readily available plugins should opt for a traditional WordPress setup.
11. Conclusion
Prioritizing the right factors can make the decision between WordPress and headless CMS clearer. Based on the aspects detailed above, here’s a priority focussed summary:
- A headless CMS paired with modern frontend frameworks like Next.js, React or Vue.js enables rich, interactive sites that leverage modern frontend tooling.
- Delivering this quality typically requires a skilled frontend team with expertise in tooling, scalability, performance and SEO.
- WordPress setups allow WYSIWYG editing, fast changes, quick experimentation and early feedback.
- Prioritizing fast turnaround may mean giving up some benefits that a tailor-made website can offer.
- A WordPress based setup can benefit from the mature plugin and themes ecosystem allowing to quickly build features without coding.
- Plugins and themes may need to be vetted to avoid performance or security issues.
- Starter kits and AI tools are gradually making custom frontends easier and faster to build even with limited coding skills.
- A headless CMS setup can be part of a project that integrate multiple sub-systems (e.g. - flight search engine, document sharing capability, etc).
- Delivering such a setup requires a seasoned tech team.
Overall, headless CMS excels in delivering modern frontend experience, flexibility, performance and security. WordPress shines in situations where WYSIWYG editing, quick turnaround, budget efficiency and minimal coding are of priority.
I began as an independent React performance specialist in 2017. Over time, some teams were kind enough to let me help solve their CMS troubles.
Fast forward to now, I work with teams to select and implement the right CMS + frontend stacks, tailored to their content workflow needs - covering integrations, migrations and more.
Got CMS pain points? Let's talk - email me at punit@tezify.com.