When you read about headless WordPress, you might conclude that a headless WordPress site will be faster, more secure, more expensive, and more difficult to manage than running a WordPress site on any hosting provider of your choice.
I am always playing and testing stuff so I wanted to see if a headless WordPress was the next step in the evolutionary process.
These are my thoughts about running a few tests using Simply Static and Cloudflare pages.
Table of Contents
Headless WordPress: Security
Headless WordPress security is unbeatable since there is no connection between the static pages visitors and bots see and your database and WordPress installation.
You won’t get hacked, even if your WordPress has outdated plugins with vulnerabilities.
Your login pages won’t be brute-force attacked either.
Having said that, I sleep well at night knowing that my sites are protected by Cloudflare Firewall rules and that my hosting provider isn’t a piece of trash.
Headless WordPress: More Expensive
I have been checking some services and it gives me the impression that Headless WordPress hosting providers are not meant for small projects.
This is the pricing of Strattic Headless WordPress hosting:
$40 per month for hosting is out of my league.
If you don’t think that paying $40 to $99 per month for hosting, you can use Cloudflare Pages or Digital Ocean Apps, both of which have free tiers.
Cloudflare is very generous so I would try that if I were you.
Headless WordPress: Difficult to Manage
If you read tutorials about how to turn your site into a Headless WordPress site, you will probably feel overwhelmed when you read about lines of code, GitHub, programming languages, frameworks, and libraries as part of the process.
Doing it yourself isn’t that difficult but it requires learning new things.
If you only know how to click buttons, having a Headless WordPress site and managing yourself isn’t for you.
Headless WordPress: Faster Sites
Headless WordPress sites load in under a second, they can be really fast, however, you can have a fast WordPress site if you build sites keeping speed in mind.
My sites with no external scripts load fully in less than 250 ms, sometimes in less than 200 ms, so I am sure that I don’t have much to gain when it comes to embracing new technologies that promise blazing-fast sites.
For these tests, I am using:
- A site hosted on Digital Ocean and fully cached by CloudFlare using CloudFlare APO.
- The HTML version of that exact same site uses Simply Static and Cloudflare Pages.
The site loads these 7 requests:
| Requests | Size |
| HTML | 16.0KB |
| CSS | 5.00KB |
| CSS | 1.80KB |
| JS | 31.6KB |
| JS | 2.42KB |
| JS | 3.52KB |
| Favicon | 1.81KB |
I could reduce the second style and second script if I wanted to test a faster version of the site but that was the current state of the site at the moment of running these tests.
Cloudflare APO
I am subscribed to CloudFlare APO and these are the results of four tests that I ran
These are the results of the first GTMetrix test:
| Connect | 55ms |
| Backend | 26ms |
| First Contentful Paint | 162ms |
| Large Content Paint | 162ms |
| Time to Interactive | 194ms |
| Onload time | 210ms |
| Fully Loaded Time | 228ms |
These are the results of the second GTMetrix test:
| Connect | 69ms |
| Backend | 30ms |
| First Contentful Paint | 163ms |
| Large Content Paint | 163ms |
| Time to Interactive | 200ms |
| Onload time | 201ms |
| Fully Loaded Time | 220ms |
These are the results of the third GTMetrix test:
| Connect | 17ms |
| Backend | 32ms |
| First Contentful Paint | 115ms |
| Large Content Paint | 115ms |
| Time to Interactive | 150ms |
| Onload time | 151ms |
| Fully Loaded Time | 170ms |
These are the results of the fourth GTMetrix test:
| Connect | 16ms |
| Backend | 24ms |
| First Contentful Paint | 102ms |
| Large Content Paint | 102ms |
| Time to Interactive | 137ms |
| Onload time | 140ms |
| Fully Loaded Time | 166ms |
As you can see, the results, tend to get slightly better after we run more and more tests.
166ms for fully loaded time is quite impressive.
Since seeing is believing, this is a screenshot of the fourth test
Now let’s check how the site performs using Cloudflare pages.
Cloudflare Pages: Headless WordPress
Creating a static site to run a few tests isn’t that complicated, just install the Simply Static plugin by Patrick Posner
I downloaded the copy and uploaded the folder to Cloudflare Pages.
The site loads 7 requests:
| Requests | Size |
| HTML | 14.7KB |
| CSS | 5.01KB |
| CSS | 1.78KB |
| JS | 31.7KB |
| JS | 2.44KB |
| JS | 3.53KB |
| Favicon | 1.78KB |
As you can see the size of your files will be pretty much the same once they are converted to static pages
These are the results of my first test:
| Connect | 28ms |
| Backend | 59ms |
| First Contentful Paint | 190ms |
| Large Content Paint | 190ms |
| Time to Interactive | 221ms |
| Onload time | 343ms |
| Fully Loaded Time | 536ms |
These are the results of my second test:
| Connect | 57ms |
| Backend | 80ms |
| First Contentful Paint | 264ms |
| Large Content Paint | 264ms |
| Time to Interactive | 302ms |
| Onload time | 310ms |
| Fully Loaded Time | 428ms |
These are the results of my third test:
| Connect | 29ms |
| Backend | 67ms |
| First Contentful Paint | 196ms |
| Large Content Paint | 196ms |
| Time to Interactive | 236ms |
| Onload time | 363ms |
| Fully Loaded Time | 555ms |
These are the results of my fourth test:
| Connect | 26ms |
| Backend | 170ms |
| First Contentful Paint | 438ms |
| Large Content Paint | 438ms |
| Time to Interactive | 474ms |
| Onload time | 480ms |
| Fully Loaded Time | 542ms |
This is a screenshot of the fourth test
I decided to run a test after adding a domain to the static site project, just to make sure the comparison was fair.
| Connect | 21ms |
| Backend | 13ms |
| First Contentful Paint | 160ms |
| Large Content Paint | 160ms |
| Time to Interactive | 219ms |
| Onload time | 558ms |
| Fully Loaded Time | 590ms |
Cloudflare APO was still superior to Cloudflare Pages.
Headless WordPress Hosting Providers
These are some headless WordPress Hosting Providers that might guarantee better results that the ones I got with Cloudflare pages:
Conclusion
I got kinda excited about turning one of my sites into a Headless WordPress site because the idea of doing it sounds kinda cool.
If you know what you are doing when building and securing sites, you won’t gain much by jumping into the Headless WordPress bandwagon.
I recognize that the speed tests carried out could be different If I would have used this or that headless hosting provider but they are way too pricey to consider.
I don’t really know if people using those headless managed hosting services would get sites better results than I was able to get, but let me tell you this, a fully loaded site in less than 166ms is kinda hard to beat, and even if you beat it, what taking it to 130 ms gets you?
My sites aren’t Amazon or Walmart, I am not gaining millions of dollars by reducing the fully loaded time by 20ms.
This post was written by God and this is not the Bible, run your own tests and choose wisely.
