Keep the WordPress your team knows. Upgrade everything they see.
Your editors are fluent in WordPress; your frontend ambitions have outgrown a theme. Headless WordPress keeps the familiar admin — posts, media, the workflows your team already runs — and feeds it through WPGraphQL or the REST API to a React frontend that's fast by architecture.
When headless WordPress makes sense
The frontend outgrew the theme
Interactive product experiences, app-like navigation, design ambitions PHP templating fights — a React frontend delivers them without abandoning your CMS.
Familiar editing, zero retraining
Your team keeps the WordPress admin they know — often with the block editor mapped cleanly onto frontend components. No CMS migration, no retraining budget.
Speed as a feature
Statically generated pages from a CDN edge: the plugin-stacked theme's 4-second load becomes sub-second, and Core Web Vitals go green by design.
WordPress off the attack surface
The admin lives privately behind the frontend rather than at yoursite.com/wp-admin greeting every bot on the internet — a real security posture change for the most-attacked CMS there is.
Content beyond the website
The same posts and fields feed mobile apps, digital signage or partner integrations through the API — WordPress as content service, not just website.
A stepping stone, honestly assessed
Teams sometimes choose headless WordPress en route to bigger content needs. If your requirements really point at headless Drupal, we'll say so before you build twice.
Most WordPress sites shouldn't go headless
A well-built traditional WordPress site with a lean theme is fast, cheap to run, and lets you use the whole plugin ecosystem — forms, SEO, commerce — out of the box. Going headless means rebuilding some of that in the frontend and maintaining two systems. It earns its cost when the frontend ambition, security posture or multi-channel need is real. Roughly half the people who ask us about headless WordPress leave with a recommendation for the boring version — and a smaller invoice.
Common questions
Do our plugins still work?
Content and admin plugins, yes. Frontend-rendering plugins (page builders, form renderers, most SEO output) need their job done in React instead — mapping that split honestly is a fixed part of our scoping, so surprises surface before the quote.
REST API or WPGraphQL?
WPGraphQL for most serious builds — precise queries, better typing for the frontend. The core REST API suits simpler content models. We choose per project and document why.
What does headless WordPress cost?
Typically £15,000–£40,000 depending on content model and frontend ambition — genuinely less than equivalent headless Drupal, more than a themed build. Discovery produces a fixed quote and an honest "do you need this?" answer first.
Show us the frontend you're dreaming of
And the WordPress site you have. An engineer will tell you what headless would involve — and whether a better theme gets you there cheaper.
Discuss headless WordPress