Using Headless WordPress with Next.js and Vercel

WordPress is a popular Content Management System (CMS), powering over 43% of the web. To improve the security, performance, and scalability of WordPress applications, developers decouple their WordPress content from their web infrastructure.

This post will show how to use headless WordPress with a frontend framework (Next.js) on secure, fast infrastructure (Vercel) :

• Instant page loads by prerendering HTML from your WordPress content

• Flexible data fetching using GraphQL with the WPGraphQL plugin

• Updating content without deploying using Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR)

What is Headless WordPress?

Headless architecture decouples your frontend and backend into separate, independently scalable pieces of infrastructure. Headless WordPress enables you to keep your existing content workflows in place while evolving your frontend for increased performance.

Comparing traditional WordPress architecture and headless WordPress with Vercel frontend.

While your frontend can consume the WordPress REST API to display your content, WordPress plugins (like WPGraphQL) enable you to generate a GraphQL API with zero configuration.

Why Go Headless?

Decoupling your frontend and CMS-backed content provides many benefits:

• Flexible: You can use Next.js to evolve your frontend separately over time.
• Resilient: If your WordPress server has downtime, your Vercel-hosted frontend will continue to serve your traffic without interruption, showing the last statically generated content from the cache. Once your WordPress server is back online, you can then start displaying new content.

• Easy & Instantaneous Content Updates: In a WordPress dashboard, anyone can keep content up to date. Developers can keep their focus on building applications while others make content changes. Also, with Vercel's Incremental Static Regeneration, changes are propagated globally in less than 500ms.