Headless WordPress | Strattic & Elementor

great video as always Paul thank you. I was wondering if you know anything about JAMstack? My client wants to move away from wordpress and use a developer who uses JAMstack but I know very little about it and am concerned they are moving to a technology that won't be as sturdy as wordpress. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

For the price, I prefer to pay for a bootcamp and learn how to code.

I am only a few minutes in but so far it seems like your confusing static page generation and "headless". They are not the same thing, your talking about caching and cdns, but thats also not the same thing. Yes "headless" serves a static page, and yes that static page could be generated, but it doesnt have to be. The main thing that makes headless headless is that the data is not served with the page. The page is served with "skeletons" or dumy content areas (typically grey) and then a request is made to an api (in this case wp) to get the data and then when it arrives it populates the page. This is more like how apps work. And it makes the same page served for different content, which better leverages browser caching so subsequent pages are faster (2nd and 3rd page loads). For example, if you have a shop, the same product page is served for every product, the data such as product name, description and images are not served, but then after the page loads they are requested. After the request respondes the content is updated with the correct data, then when you go to the next peoduct page... Its actually the exact same page which the browser already has cached so there is a 0 second load time. It just request the new product data and rerenders the content. Browser caching is always faster than server or cdn cachkmg so its faster. Not having to load the actual markup on each page load means less data is sent so its faster. Think of it as only requesting the difference between the last page and the next between each page load, instead of the entire page

This is not a headless 👎👎👎

How much dies it costs? For hobby pages maybe too expensive. And reverse proxy with server network and good security is save enough. Spoed it up for 7 euro a month..... Cloud hosting. And for companies earning money with shops and apps doesn't need thus at all. They pay developers.

Perfectly explained Paul you are the best!

I really don't understand the difference between this solution and a usual caching system, that also creates static html files - can you help?

good

Looks like a great solution for non-Ecommerce websites built in WP/Elementor. I think for bigger companies with their own internal marketing departments who use external developers to build their websites (the last company I worked for did exactly this) then it is a perfect platform for them to have a dev site, a staging site and a fast live site. Looks good to me.

It's too expensive, for blogs comments on posts required if it's static it will not support comments.

And at that price we can use hybrid cloud hosting and can get great gtmetrix and lighthouse score by optimization

Do those Headless services work with all wordpress plugins ? what are the limited... are plugins not supported ?...

I'm really curious about this and I would love for you to review the WP Engine offering as well. Great video Paul.

Great video as usual. Love the way you get straight to the point.
I'm not 100% sold on Headless yet. The costs outway the benefits IMO and the current limitations (i.e. no Woocommerce) are a dealbreaker for me. I guess the direction of tying WP into a WIX or Squarespace type environments is clear, though. I still think Strattic will remain its own thing though, and not be combined with Elementor Cloud Websites soon.

Really good work!

Cool

thanks for this overview , Headless is something I want to understand . Would be awesome if Elementor hire you to doing more deep with Custom Post or ACF things in headless environment

Minor clarification, browsers don't do anything with PHP

Put the page together as an HTML output and render that to the client (instead of building the page every time), isn't that what a cache plugin (like WP Rocket) or even a CDN (Cloudflare, Bunny...) do...? What's the advantage then? Prices are pretty high for Strattic...

If this happens this will be one of the greatest things for Elementor and Wordpress and will leap light years away from gutenberg in my opinion

Is this method compatible with showing Ads? I guess it’s not.

Forms, e-commerce and some other dynamic functionalities don't work without third party services. Could be good for the right clients or businesses.

Very interesting, but the headless system on WordPress projects ist a bit to expensive. When we got projects with headless, they are mostly to big for WordPress and idk if this solve the problem, that it goes to slow when the system comes very complex. Actually we set by headless systems to hybris or Ghost or Prismic

Very interesting, but the headless system on WordPress projects ist a bit to expensive. When we got projects with headless, they are mostly to big for WordPress and idk if this solve the problem, that it goes to slow when the system comes very complex. Actually we set by headless systems to hybris or Ghost or Prismic

Edit: to expensive for small businesses

This is great, but it is certainly NOT HEADLESS, it is static Wordpress! (Not saying it is not useful) There are also other tools that allow you achieve this even for free. I have one tutorial on my channel about it.

😂 I genuinely believed after all that you were going to show 100% on mobile and desktop. I'm getting 98% on both using Vultr + Plesk + Elementor Pro with a graphically heavy site and some careful optimisation with lightspeed cache.
Great video though, very informative as always 👍

Another essential video from Paul. Thank you. Your tutorials are priceless.

Not jumping on it yet...

Hi Paul, thanks for this tut, however I preferred to compare the speed with and without using the Headless server. I mean you could build the same website on the normal server and then test the speed as well, and then we could have a better idea regarding how performance in gonna improve.
The second thing is regarding comments in WordPress? Is Headless support comments as well? or do we need to manually push the changes to live again?
Thanks

Also, don't you think it's a bit overpriced ?

There is no advantage. There aren't many particularly important factors. I don't want to recommend it...

Thanks for this review, I was wondering about all of it. That being said, many questions arise…what I can say is the total page load was 2.4 seconds in your tests. I can achieve that with Flywheel and WPMU doing the same and using Blocksy… I do think you example may prove to feel a bit snappier….But I think the final analysis in regards to speed, its a lot of effort to have no speed difference for more effort, of course this is part from security issues which are worth of some consideration.

Nice video - you and web squadron have this synced 😀... I'm not convinced on this just yet but let's see what they've got up their sleeves for the future

I just gotta give some love to the Strattic logo. Love that logo.

Interesting but pretty much pointless without Woo. The limitation probably has a lot to do with the incomplete Woo API.
The bandwidth limits are also way to low for larger sites as are the storage limits.
There are much better headless solutions available especially if you are using Woo.
I am moving totally away from builders by using a React front end with WP/Woo backend.

I have much better results for mobile with just Blocksy installed.

I'm not seeing a whole lot of benefit for the high costs associated with this kind of platform. I am seeing the potential for significant time consumption while waiting for things to render, however. It's interesting, but nah. Too restrictive in too many ways. Guessing this is going to take over E's cloud platform. If so, that could be a massive price jump for anyone currently using it.
Would love to know what static plugins you might recommend. Tried one a while back that didn't work well at all. If there are others that work, I could be all in.

Keep up the good work Paul! Good to know how headless WP now works, but to be honest when you showed the PSI score… I don’t see the benefit of switching from a Litespeed server. Much cheaper, much faster, and secured.

Ok here we have the elementor bullsh*t pricing. This is a great idea. Maybe we need more competition to bring the prices down. But looking at the pricing maybe its not for everyone.

I think the pricing option would determine the path that my clients would take since most clients do not want to pay more than the monthly subscription of Wix or Shopify, so if they are going to compete in this space, then perhaps yes, there might be place for this in the future. I guess we will have to wait and see how they solve the Woocommerce or at least offer an e-commerce option in the build.

I do this for simple sites using the Simply Static plugin then I use Netlify to host.

I see the benefit behind static WordPress builds, But strattic seems to enjoy confusing the word static with headless? Maybe as a way to ride on a trendy buzzword or wave?

The consensus on what a "headless CMS" approach is to use WP (or another CMS) for content management (admin) and use a JavaScript based frontend (Gatsby, Gridsome, Frontity) and link the two via the REST API or GraphQL.

What strattic are doing here is never considered "headless", it's just static, I've never seen another company purposefully confuse the two words. WP Engine Atlas is an example of headless WP and the two approaches are completely different.

Good overview, I'm not sold though as not supporting woo commerce is a deal breaker for me. Hopefully it will support more in the future I don't want to be paying for limitations.

Thanks for the run through Paul - appreciated. For me the only use case would be to cherry pick this option if i ever had a client / project that warranted the investment. i.e they paying a premium for a particular project and if there is a nice fit in regards to a requirement to "speed up" what would be slower on WordPress. - perhaps a deep listings site for example....

Hi Paul, thanks for the video. Can head-less wordpress used for dynamic sites like buddyboss?

Although I still pay my subscription for older/clients websites, Elementor has had its day for me. Gutenberg is the future whether we like it or not, and it's getting better. With third party block builders Elementor isn't required anymore. Except for those old clients sites 🤣

Thanks for this. Good overview on going headless for WordPress.

A see a notification from you, I like already lol!

Present