How to Create a Headless WordPress Site with Angular
Are you interested in learning how to use technologies like Angular for frontend development and create a Headless WordPress website?
Table of contents
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Introduction
According to W3Techs, WordPress is the most widely used content management system in the world, powering 43 percent of all websites on the internet. WordPress, on the other hand, is a monolithic platform with a closely integrated frontend and backend that makes it unmanageable for developers who want to create digital experiences that are not dependent on the theme-based structure of WordPress.
It’s possible that detaching the front end from the backend will solve your problems if you’ve ever felt locked or stuck when working with WordPress. WordPress developers that choose to go headless will have access to a wealth of new opportunities, including new frameworks, technological stacks, and delivery channels, as a result of their decision.
Here we are going to talk about how to build a headless WordPress website with Angular? Because big enterprises like Upwork, Freelancer, PayPal, Deutsche Bank, Forbes, and Guardian use Angular as their front-end development technology.
What is Headless WordPress?
A headless WordPress website is a site that mainly uses WordPress for content management and uses any other technology to build the front-end and display the content to the website visitors.
The headless WordPress CMS, also known as a decoupling CMS, differs greatly from a traditional content management system (CMS) in terms of architecture. The headless CMS architecture separates the frontend and backend of the site, splitting it into two virtually autonomous systems. In contrast to the one system that produces, stores, and manages information, the other system exposes data to end-users through graphical user interfaces (UIs) such as a website, smartphone application, or Internet of Things device. When developing a headless WordPress website, developers use a REST API to communicate between the backend and the frontend.
Rest API allows developers to interact with cross-technology interfaces as long as both speak the same language of JSON. WordPress Rest API spits out data in JSON format, which is understandable by a large number of web technologies. JSON is a text-based representation of JavaScript objects which contains data in key-value pairs.
Today, I will demonstrate the power of WordPress Rest API by using it with Angular and WordPress as headless CMS for my basic web application.
The Benefits of Using Headless WordPress CMS
Being an open-source platform, WordPress offers great flexibility to create any website. Using WordPress as a headless CMS allows you to create the front-end of your web application using any web technology and manage its content using one of the most popular CMS.
You might come across the situation where you need to add a blog feature to an existing web app built with either Vue.js or React. Instead of coding the full-fledged content management system in the native framework, use headless WordPress CMS to manage the content using Rest API.
The following are some of the advantages of headless WordPress as compared to traditional WordPress, that make it more effective to use:
Flexibility: A Headless CMS allows for greater flexibility in terms of programming language and framework selection, removing many of the constraints associated with the traditional paradigm. Additionally, similar data can be reused across multiple projects with a simple export, which is advantageous in the event of a CMS change.
Security: It is less vulnerable and prone to third-party application problems because your material is stored apart from your front-end delivery system.
Multichannel: A Headless CMS enables you to manage your content across various channels, providing significantly increased adaptability and a seamless user experience. The material is regarded as “pure” because the REST API transmits the data in JSON format, which could be reused and read by any frontend.
Optimized site loading time: Because the presentation layers are separated and the logic for presenting data is relocated to the client-side, the speed of data transmission is significantly increased.
Deeper visual control: Even the most complex WordPress themes or web page templates can’t be changed. If you’re a front-end developer or a content creator, the headless architecture gives you a lot of freedom when it comes to how your content looks on the web.