Headless CMS vs WordPress

Headless CMS vs WordPress - Migrating a website from one CMS to another can seem painful and frustrating, but moving to the right CMS will improve your results and ability to grow online. There are various reasons to change Content Management System (CMS) from WordPress to a headless one. Here are the 5 best arguments to move your website to a headless CMS like DatoCMS.

5 Reasons to Move Your Website from WordPress to a headless CMS

Compared to a traditional CMS, a headless solution doesn't offer you a ready-to-use front-end. In other words, it doesn't provide a presentation layer for displaying your content to the end-user out of the gate. It's about choosing between the convenience of a complete package or the unparalleled versatility of a headless CMS.

Iron-clad Security without Maintenance

It's not true that all sites built on WordPress are insecure. You can keep your platform safe by choosing the right hosting solution, installing only plugins from reliable sources, and updating the platform as frequently as possible. What is true, however, is that it takes work, time, and skills to attain these results.

SaaS Headless CMS solutions take care of security and maintenance for you so you can focus on, well, managing and producing content. DatoCMS serves content — images, text values — via an API to every platform of your choice without the need for you to manage a database like WordPress. We do that part for you.

No database means less unknown vulnerabilities and gateways that someone could exploit. All your dynamic content is safely stored and managed in your CMS, and you can even enforce two-factor authentication for sensitive content.

It's cheaper

Yes, a paid SaaS subscription for DatoCMS is less expensive than a free Wordpress installation. How so?

Well, premium Wordpress plugins are witnessing a price hike like never before. A reliable, competent hosting solution may even cost you thousands every year, even for smaller websites.

Do you know how much you would spend for a platform built with a state-of-the-art site generator, accompanied by a free and curated plugin library, and a hyper-fast hosting solution? Zero. Dollars.

Need more? With a traditional stack, hosting and maintenance costs become prohibitive when your website attracts a considerable number of visits. With a headless CMS and a modern stack, the prices are so low it's not even a fair comparison. Everything scales beautifully with an unparalleled price to performance ratio.

It's faster

Ok, this is another point that requires a premise. There are sites built with WordPress that show impressive performance, thanks to caching and aggressive image optimization techniques. Claiming that sites built using a headless CMS are always faster is marketing speak.

However, a website built with DatoCMS, all things being equal, generally is faster than a traditional solution. Headless CMSs tend to use a CDN out-of-the-box to serve data and images to users, offering response times lower than 20 ms.

Moreover, a website built with a modern tech stack only has the code to run the front-end site and can more easily be optimized for speed.

Focus on (real) content management

The purpose of a CMS should be to manage structured content in a fast, transparent and effective way. Unfortunately, when a CMS also has the task of managing all the stack, there is a risk of favoring the final result for the end-user, losing sight of the real goal.

DatoCMS, thanks to the API-centered approach, allows you to manage your structured content and create transparent and effective relationships between them.

You can reuse content on multiple devices and platforms, or import entire sections of one site into another in seconds. This speeds up production significantly, giving you a faster time-to-market.

Flexibility above all

Traditional CMSs like WordPress ask you to speak their language and be limited by their frameworks.

DatoCMS is an API-first platform, which means it feeds content into any platform via a Content Delivery API. Thanks to the power of GraphQL, every property can retrieve exactly the data it needs from the API, and nothing more. This way, developers can spend more time focusing on content creation and less on content management.

They can build a front-end that makes sense for the project using their favorite framework and language. Being API-first also means that your CMS can communicate seamlessly with a wide range of services while remaining light in coding.