The WordPress Problem: Agility vs Scale

For marketing teams, WordPress’ flexible and intuitive editorial experience is an invaluable asset to their workflow. Creating and updating content for new campaigns and SEO is simple and straightforward and allows them to be fast and agile with content.

But in many other ways, WordPress can also be restrictive. Particularly when it comes to the needs of modern businesses (frontend development, personalisation, composable architecture).

As a result, many companies want to migrate to a modern, composable CMS in order to avoid these restrictions.

The Modern CMS Trap

But this change comes at the cost of abandoning the WordPress editorial experience and losing the fast and agile workflow that made it such an asset to the marketing team. A lot of these more “developer-focused” CMS’s aren’t user-friendly for marketing teams and require technical know-how to make changes.

This leads to a Developer Bottleneck. 

Marketing teams want to make changes but they can’t do it without help from developers. Even the smallest updates can’t be done independently. 

So your marketing team’s momentum grinds to a halt waiting for developers. Meanwhile, your development team is held back by having to constantly fix issues for marketing. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Along with the Developer Bottleneck, many advanced CMS options don’t have the kind of user-friendly content features that WordPress offers. This means marketing teams have to learn a new, complex workflow which leads to significant training overheads and drastically slows down marketing efforts.

On the other hand, though, being stuck with a CMS that doesn’t meet your needs is a major disadvantage in terms of user experience, scalability, and integration.

Headless WordPress: The Best of Both Worlds

So how can you find a solution that meets in the middle? One that empowers marketing teams and enables agility and scalability in your CMS? 

We’ve found that using a Headless WordPress architecture provides the best of both worlds.

A Headless CMS separates the content from the display. So you can keep the familiar WordPress dashboard that your team already knows and loves for managing content. Meanwhile, the “front end” (what the customer sees) is built with modern technology that allows for lightning-fast performance and navigation. 

Keeping WordPress workflows minimises interruption for your marketing teams, eliminating the need for potential training overheads or loss of momentum from switching to a new CMS with a less streamlined editorial workflow. Meanwhile, your development team isn’t restricted by WordPress themes. They can build a high-performance, personalised, and conversion-optimised customer experience that looks and behaves exactly how you want it to. 

Headless In Action

At Drewl we have been working with Headless from the very beginning, building business sites that combine flexible, scalable development with intuitive marketing workflows. 

Along with implementing Headless WordPress systems, we also build on WordPress’ strengths by implementing custom features tailored to your marketing workflow. So as well as retaining the familiar WordPress editorial experience, you get an even faster, personalised workflow that empowers your marketing team to iterate and react quickly to market changes.

For example, in our work with Attest, we moved their site from monolithic WordPress, to a Headless system, using WordPress to manage content, and React for the frontend. React freed the design team from the restrictions of templates, allowing them to build a truly bespoke digital experience.

To ensure the marketing team didn’t lose their agility we built:

• Custom React-based Gutenberg blocks: This allowed the marketing team to manage and customise layouts quickly without depending on developers
• Optimised Backend Workflows: We streamlined Attest’s workflows, reducing complexity and enabling rapid content updates

The Result: A flexible, high-performance website that gave Attest’s marketing team full control over their content.

Work With Us

Want a WordPress site that lives in the sweet spot of keeping both your marketing and development teams happy? Schedule a free, 30-minute Strategy Call with us and we’ll make it happen.