Why Headless (or Decoupled) WordPress Isn’t the Silver Bullet You Were Sold
A few years ago, headless was being touted as the future of web development: faster, more flexible, more modern. Developers loved it, agencies sold it, and business leaders signed off because it sounded like a safe bet to “future-proof” their digital presence.
But we’re seeing a shift. And not just because the market is over the buzzwords. The reality is that many of the supposed benefits of headless architecture don’t hold up under scrutiny, particularly for content-heavy brands like publishers or marketers whose operations revolve around editorial velocity, workflows and simplicity.
Here’s what we’ve observed from the front lines.
Myth 1: Headless = Performance
Performance was a key promise of headless. The idea: decouple the front end from the back end, use a framework like NextJS and the site will be blazing fast.
The truth? A fast front end still requires good engineering. We’ve seen plenty of poorly built headless front ends that are heavier and slower than a well-tuned traditional WordPress site.
You don’t automatically gain speed by going headless. You just gain complexity, including in your hosting and infrastructure setup, which can balloon in cost and overhead without delivering proportional benefit.
Myth 2: Headless Improves Editorial Experience
This one’s a heartbreaker for editorial and product teams. Headless often means losing the autonomy WordPress has always offered. Things like live preview, scheduling, layout adjustments or even installing a plugin suddenly need developer involvement. What used to be intuitive becomes a ticketed request.
We’ve seen editorial teams stall under the weight of technical dependencies. And that friction isn’t limited to workflow, it extends to infrastructure too, where managing separate front-end deployments, build pipelines, and hosting services becomes yet another layer to maintain. And often, they’re left rebuilding functionality WordPress already solved years ago.
Myth 3: Headless Future-Proofs Your Stack
Sure, decoupling sounds great in theory. But what many teams don’t realise until it’s too late is that headless locks you into a whole new set of dependencies: front-end frameworks, API integrations, orchestration layers, and developer skill sets.
That’s not future-proofing. That’s just shifting the complexity.
What’s more sustainable? Starting with something robust and proven, and only introducing new architecture when it truly solves a problem. In our experience, headless often solves problems that don’t exist.
So When Does Headless Make Sense?
We’re not anti-headless. We’re anti-unnecessary complexity.
There are valid reasons to go headless: multi-site front ends across multiple frameworks, decoupled data sources, or when content is just one piece of a larger application. But those use cases are the exception, not the rule.
Even Matt Mullenweg, WordPress cofounder, noted at WordCamp Asia 2025 that many early adopters are returning to a monolithic WordPress setup for simplicity, performance, and plugin access. “It can be good for job security as a developer, but maybe not the most efficient for the client,” he said. The pendulum is swinging back.
We’re also seeing it in the data. The State of Enterprise WordPress 2024 report shows headless adoption in decline, with 75% of enterprises now saying they don’t use it, up significantly from 62% the year prior.
WordPress is already composable. You can iterate fast, preview content in real time, and swap components like analytics or search tools without a full rebuild.
You don’t need headless to be modern. You need to be intentional. Intentional with your stack, your workflows, and your resourcing.
As I often say to prospective clients, headless adds three to ten times the complexity, but rarely offers three to ten times the ROI.
The Bottom Line
At The Code Company, we’ve seen the hype cycle play out before. Headless isn’t the first over-engineered solution and it won’t be the last.
We’ve stepped into projects where the promise of “modern architecture” led to spiralling costs, added complexity, and frustrated teams. In many cases, clients came to us after months of delays and diminishing returns, asking how to get back to something stable and manageable.
That’s why we lead with simplicity. Not because it’s easy, but because it works. Especially for content-led brands where speed, autonomy and clarity matter more than technical novelty.
If your agency is pushing headless, ask why. If your internal team wants it, ask what problem it solves. Replatforming is expensive. So is slow decision-making and developer bottlenecks.
You don’t need headless to be future-proof. You need a platform that delivers, now.
