Teams hire a headless WordPress developer to keep the editors and content they already have while the public site moves to Next.js, Astro or Nuxt. We place engineers who have shipped that split before, as a single developer, an extension of your team, or a scoped project.
Jobs we staff on headless WordPress
- Expose WordPress content through WPGraphQL or the REST API, including ACF fields, custom post types and taxonomies.
- Build the decoupled frontend and render Gutenberg content as real components instead of raw HTML.
- Rebuild preview so editors see a draft in the new frontend before they publish.
- Wire publish webhooks to cache revalidation, so a saved post appears on the site without a full rebuild.
- Audit plugins and decide what moves to the frontend, what gets replaced and what is dropped.
If your real goal is leaving WordPress altogether, that is a different project. Read about moving from WordPress to a headless CMS and the trade-offs in WordPress versus headless CMS first.
Where headless WordPress projects go wrong
Plain React or Next.js skill is not enough here. We test candidates on these points:
- Gutenberg blocks arrive as HTML or as structured block data. A developer should know when to map blocks to components and what to do with core blocks nobody planned for.
- A shortcode that renders correctly in a theme shows up as literal text through an API, and plugin markup has the same problem.
- A nested WPGraphQL query for a listing page can hit the database hard. We ask how they would shape and cache it.
- Preview of drafts needs a token, not a logged-in cookie, and it must not leak unpublished content.
- Yoast or Rank Math fields have to be read from the API and rendered by the frontend, along with redirects and canonical URLs.
- Image URLs, sizes and the WordPress upload host affect page speed after the split.
We also give candidates a real change to make in a WordPress codebase, because a headless project still needs PHP when a field or a hook needs to change.
What happens in the first month
Week one is access and an audit of the plugin list, the content types, the fields that matter, the traffic pages and the current preview habits of your editors. The developer then proposes the API layer and the page types to move first.
Next they ship the first template end to end, usually a landing page or an article, with preview and revalidation working. Then comes the first release behind a feature flag or on a subset of URLs, with redirects checked against your existing permalinks. What comes next is agreed with you based on what shipped.
One developer, an extension or a project
You can hire a dedicated developer to work inside your team, add a QA or a designer next to them as a team extension, or hand us a scoped project where we own the delivery. Read how IT staff augmentation works, or the setup for a dedicated team if you need more than one person.
When one developer is not enough
A headless build touches infrastructure, design and content migration as well as code. If you want us to own the whole outcome, see our headless WordPress services and the headless CMS agency page. For a sense of how this goes in practice, we replatformed a Series-B fintech marketing site off a heavily customized WordPress install. Publish time fell by about 65% and LCP dropped from 4.2s to 1.4s. Looking at other platforms? Compare them on the hire headless CMS developers page.
