Skip to main content
Back to projects

Headless WordPress Content Platform

Decoupling a content-heavy WordPress site from its frontend, without losing the editorial workflows the content team relied on.

This case study describes a representative engagement drawn from my work on headless WordPress migrations — details are generalized rather than tied to a specific client under NDA.

Overview #

A publishing-focused WordPress site needed significantly better frontend performance and more flexibility in how content was presented, without disrupting the editorial team's existing WordPress workflow. The result was a decoupled architecture: WordPress stayed as the content management system and API, with a separately deployed frontend consuming it.

The Problem #

The existing setup coupled content, presentation, and a large plugin ecosystem into a single monolithic WordPress theme. That made:

  • Frontend performance hard to improve without touching plugin-rendered markup
  • Design changes slow, since every layout change required PHP template work
  • Content reuse across multiple surfaces (site, newsletter, partner syndication) difficult, since content only existed as rendered HTML

The Solution #

Rather than a full "headless from scratch" rebuild, the migration was scoped deliberately:

  1. Audited every plugin that rendered its own markup directly into the page (SEO, related-posts, forms) to determine which needed a headless-compatible replacement versus which could stay server-side behind the API.
  2. Built a custom REST namespace (site/v1) that returned exactly the fields the frontend needed, rather than the default chatty wp/v2 response shape — keeping the API cacheable and intentional.
  3. Wired preview support using signed tokens so editors could preview unpublished drafts on the new frontend, matching the preview experience they were used to.
  4. Added webhook-based revalidation — WordPress notifies the frontend on publish/ update, triggering on-demand static regeneration instead of relying on a fixed cache TTL.
add_action( 'rest_api_init', function () {
    register_rest_route( 'site/v1', '/posts/(?P<slug>[a-z0-9-]+)', [
        'methods'  => 'GET',
        'callback' => 'site_get_post_by_slug',
        'permission_callback' => '__return_true',
    ] );
} );

Technology Stack #

WordPress remained the CMS and content API. The new frontend was built with Next.js, consuming WordPress's REST API through a custom namespace. Docker kept local, staging, and production environments consistent for both the WordPress backend and the frontend build pipeline.

Lessons Learned #

The riskiest part of a headless migration isn't the frontend — it's every plugin that silently assumed a WordPress-rendered page existed. Auditing that dependency graph before writing frontend code avoided a mid-project scramble to replace an SEO plugin that turned out to only work via wp_head().