WordPress or headless? A decision framework for marketing sites
Editor experience, speed budgets and the real cost of each path.
The question behind the question
Nobody actually wants a headless CMS. What they want is a fast site their marketing team can edit without filing tickets. Those two goals pull in different directions, and the honest answer depends on who edits the site and how often.
Choose classic WordPress when
Your team publishes weekly or more and needs to build new landing pages without a developer. You need a mature plugin ecosystem for forms, SEO and e-commerce. Your budget favours a shorter build with lower ongoing engineering cost. With a lean custom theme, disciplined plugin choices and a real performance budget, WordPress hits Core Web Vitals comfortably — the platform is rarely the bottleneck; the build is.
Choose headless when
You have several front-ends sharing one content source — a marketing site, an app, and in-product content. You need interface work a template system fights you on. You already have front-end engineers who will maintain it. Or your content model is genuinely complex, with relationships a page-builder cannot express.
The costs people underestimate
Headless moves complexity rather than removing it: preview environments, image pipelines, form handling, redirects and search all become your responsibility. Budget for the editor experience explicitly, or your marketing team will quietly go back to asking developers for changes — which is the problem you were solving.
How we decide
We map who edits what, how often, and how much of the site is templated versus bespoke. If more than seventy percent of pages come from templates and the team publishes regularly, WordPress wins on total cost of ownership. Read Core Web Vitals on WordPress for the performance side, and why a design system pays for itself for the build-efficiency argument.
A 30-minute consultation and a written summary of what we would prioritise.
Keep reading
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The technical SEO audit checklist we actually hand to developers
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What a credible 90-day SEO plan looks like
Month one is not "rankings". Here is what should actually happen.