Headless WordPress development in London.
A London WordPress agency building headless architectures for teams that need speed and scale. Keep the WordPress editor your team loves and ship a blazing-fast React or Next.js frontend on top of it — perfect Core Web Vitals, enterprise-grade traffic handling, and content fully decoupled from your presentation layer.
The CMS your team knows. The performance your users expect.
Headless WordPress separates content management from the frontend. Editors keep the familiar WordPress dashboard; visitors get a statically-generated or server-rendered site that loads almost instantly.
Near-Instant Load
Static generation and edge delivery mean sub-second loads and Core Web Vitals that pass comfortably on mobile.
Hardened Security
With no public-facing PHP, your WordPress admin is decoupled and shielded from the most common attack surface.
Omnichannel Content
One WordPress backend can power your website, app, and other channels through a single API.
WordPress backend, modern JavaScript frontend.
We expose your content through the WordPress REST API or WPGraphQL and build the frontend in Next.js or Gatsby, deployed to Vercel or a global edge network. You keep Advanced Custom Fields, Gutenberg, and your editorial workflow — visitors just never touch WordPress directly.
- WPGraphQL or REST API content layer
- Next.js / React frontend with incremental static regeneration
- Edge deployment on Vercel for global performance
- Preview support so editors still see drafts before publishing
- Headless WooCommerce for decoupled e-commerce
Powerful — when the use case justifies it.
Headless is the right call for high-traffic publishers, content-heavy marketing sites, and teams that need to feed multiple channels from one source of truth. For a straightforward brochure site, a well-built traditional theme is often the smarter investment — and we'll tell you so honestly.
- Ideal for high-traffic and performance-critical sites
- Great when content powers a website and an app together
- Best when an in-house or partner dev team maintains the frontend
- Not always necessary — we recommend traditional builds when they fit
What headless WordPress actually is.
A standard WordPress site does two jobs in one system: it stores your content, and it renders the pages visitors see. Headless splits those apart. WordPress keeps the first job — the dashboard, the editor, the media library, the roles your team already understands — and hands the content to a separate front end over an API. That front end, usually React or Next.js, renders the site.
Two APIs do the handing over. The REST API ships with WordPress and returns JSON for posts, pages and custom fields. WPGraphQL is a plugin that lets the front end request precisely the fields it needs in one query rather than stitching several REST calls together. For anything with a non-trivial content model, WPGraphQL usually wins.
The front end is then rendered in one of three ways, and the choice matters more than the API does:
- Static generation (SSG) — pages are built at deploy time and served from a CDN. Fastest possible delivery. Best for content that changes predictably.
- Server-side rendering (SSR) — pages are rendered per request on the server. Slightly slower, but right for personalised or frequently-changing content.
- Incremental regeneration (ISR) — static pages that quietly rebuild on a schedule or on demand. In practice this is what most content sites should use.
What you must not do is render client-side only. A front end that ships an empty shell and fetches content in the browser is the single most reliable way to damage a site's search performance, and it is why some headless projects quietly lose rankings after launch.
Most sites should not go headless.
We build these, and we still talk more clients out of headless than into it. Here is the decision as we actually make it.
Go headless when…
One content source feeds several front ends — a website, a mobile app, in-store screens, a partner portal. Or the front end is genuinely an application with complex state, not a set of pages. Or you have a JavaScript team already and WordPress is only there because the editors like it.
Do not go headless when…
It is a marketing site with a blog and a contact form. A well-built traditional WordPress theme will hit the same Lighthouse scores for a fraction of the cost. Chasing performance alone is the most common bad reason to decouple, and the gap is smaller than the vendors suggest.
What it really costs
Two codebases, two deployment pipelines, and a front end only a JavaScript developer can maintain. Plugins that "just work" on traditional WordPress — forms, SEO output, previews, redirects — each need reimplementing. Budget for that permanently, not once.
The comparison, without the sales pitch.
Performance. Headless wins, but by less than you would expect against a properly built traditional theme. A hand-coded WordPress site with no page builder, sensible caching and disciplined asset loading reaches 90+ on Lighthouse routinely. Headless makes 100 easier to hold — it does not unlock something otherwise impossible.
Editor experience. Traditional wins. Live preview, "view page" and the block editor all behave as expected. On headless, preview must be wired up deliberately, and it is the single thing editors complain about most when it is skipped.
Security. Headless has a genuine edge — the WordPress admin can sit behind authentication on a separate origin from the public site, which meaningfully reduces exposure.
Cost and maintenance. Traditional wins clearly. Headless builds start from £15,000 with us against £5,000 for a traditional custom build, and the ongoing burden is higher because two systems must stay compatible through every WordPress and framework upgrade.
We wrote this up in more depth if you want the long version: how to choose between traditional and headless WordPress, and a technical walkthrough of how to implement headless WordPress.
If after all that a traditional build is the right answer, that is what our WordPress agency and London WordPress developers do every week.