Headless WooCommerce and WordPress

Robert:
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another Do the Woo AgencyChat. It is my great pleasure to have Darko here from IntellRocket. Darko, welcome to the show.

Darko:
Hi Robert. Thank you for having me.

Robert:
Darko, tell us more about IntellRocket and yourself please.

Darko:
Yeah, thank you. So I am Darko Svetolikovic, which is hard to pronounce even in Serbian. I come from Serbia and I’m the founder of IntellRocket, which is a WordPress agency specializing in WordPress and WooCommerce development for more than a decade. Currently, we’re certified web experts and have extensive experience in building custom WordPress websites and WooCommerce stores. I can say that we’re trying to build beautiful websites, but that’s not something you can be objective about. What’s nice and what’s beautiful is subjective. However, where you can be objective is that we build websites that are really fast. So, high-performance website projects where we guarantee that our custom builds will pass core web vitals. Why is that important? Because Core Web Vitals is a ranking signal. It means that your website is fast and produces a good user experience. Clients come to us asking for some crazy implementations, so we do that, create implementations from the technical side, and usually, those kinds of projects come with custom API integration.

Robert:
Don’t spoil it yet, don’t spoil it yet because we’re going to get to it. Before we jump into the next sort of little bit here, I have to say there is a huge Serbian WordPress community and it’s very impressive.

Darko:
Well, I see some people only at WordCamps. We live in the same city, but if there’s no WordPress meetup or something like that, we don’t see each other. And then I see them only at WordCamps, WordCamp Europe, or WordCamps across Europe. So yeah, there is a huge, huge community here. We hosted WordCamp 2018. I think it was WordCamp Europe in Belgrade, 2018 or 2019, I’m not sure.

Robert:
Yeah, so that’s very impressive.

Darko:
We have a huge community here, and I suppose that is something that is driving WordPress. So it’s not only the Serbian community; it’s communities across the globe.

Robert:
I completely agree. It was actually really nice to see the Serbian community specifically having their little side meetups and things going on at WordCamps Europe. Nice group of folks. To get back to all the agency-important information, of course. You’ve mentioned performance as a key metric, not only for Core Web Vitals but for other, I guess, experience-related issues or experiences, period. What has IntellRocket done differently than other agencies around that performance question?

Darko:
Well, it’s not that we’re doing something different. We’re focused on building websites that are fast and performant. We really dive deep into how WordPress operates, how everything functions, how everything works. So we try to optimize and make it better. And because of that, I can say those are performance-related things. I think I’m passionate about performance since I started my business and my agency work. I’m not a developer, so I don’t have that experience related to technical things, but I can say I have some good people on my team who are willing to do what I ask them to do.

Robert:
So I want to dig into why that’s important for you, but also why it’s important for agencies as a whole to be looking at performance as a metric and specifically beyond hosting. Because every host is going to say they’re the fastest, the best. We know the story. So why should agencies specifically be looking to target performance? How can they do that better?

Darko:
So about performance, of course, hosting is important, but if you have a well-coded website, then the hosting will be important but not that much. If you have a huge website that’s not optimized well, you’ll spend a fortune on hosting for that website to have good performance. So I would say everything is important: good code, good structure, good hosting. I’m passionate about performance. So because of that, I started working on performance. But 10 years ago, technologies were different. That’s when that passion started. And then we started working on improving websites. So why should agencies care, or why should businesses care? Because that helps user experience. A fast website helps with conversion rates. Then that helps with revenue, that helps with profit margins. So I have a case where we worked on a client who was paying for Google Ads but didn’t have an optimized website. So we started optimizing that website, and they were investing in PPC at that moment. Their website was, for example, let’s say third in Google, first, second, third ad is like the third place. And then when we optimized the website for the same budget, this client had, let’s say, a second position, and the cost per click reduced, for example, just for this case from $1 to 0.8. So they had 20% more traffic for the same budget. So that improved their Google Ads score. They got like 20% more clicks for the same money, but then that traffic landed on their website. And because the website was faster, they had a 20% better conversion rate. So 20% more traffic multiplied by 20% better conversion rate. They ended up increasing their profit by about 35%. That is why it’s important. It’s affecting your revenue in a short period. So it’s easy to test. With SEO, it’s harder because it takes more time to see what’s affecting your website. I would say agencies that are doing SEO or marketing should care about performance. Even though I know what is happening in real life because it’s not possible for most companies to achieve that. Of course, other work is important, but if you isolate all of this, I would say it can make a significant difference.

Robert:
That’s a really interesting and good point about Google AdWords being affected by performance. When you tackle performance issues, are you tackling them at the front end, the backend? Where is that really making the biggest difference?

Darko:
We’re trying everything. So, of course, we analyze the backend use. I don’t know how the tools are called, but we analyze every query monitor, I think. So we analyze everything in the backend and how everything is working, but also we use code that is optimized. So even without caching, without anything, we tend to make fast websites. And then on top of that, we add caching, JavaScript, minification, all those things. But we make websites that are fast without any caching. We add caching in order to reduce resource spending and all of that. We try to make it fast from scratch. We try everything that we see from the backend, we will resolve it. Everything that puts me on the front end, we will try to resolve. Some things are possible, some things are hard, some things are not possible because you have some scripts you cannot handle. External scripts like Google Analytics and those kinds of things. And then those sometimes appear in the report. But we have also websites where we were adding 200 different Google events and those websites passed Core Web Vitals. So it’s not about Google Analytics slowing down the website.

Robert:
And you mentioned building, I’ll say it, custom front ends, and obviously you do a lot of work with WooCommerce. So I have to say it’s something unique I haven’t seen in any of our regular Do the Woo AgencyChats. Let’s dive into what you’re calling headless WooCommerce.

Darko:
So as I said, the passion about SEO, the passion about performance, and also API in the backend, all that was a solid foundation for starting something that is called headless WordPress or headless WooCommerce. How it explains headless, but in essence, that is JAMstack or headless, WordPress, headless website, headless WooCommerce, JAMstack e-commerce. Those are the terms. So it represents that you separate the front end from the backend. The backend is running on its own server. You use the API from the backend to send all the necessary information. And then the frontend is independently hosted. This simplifies the frontend and the backend because you don’t have in the traditional stacks, you visit the website, the visitor comes to your website, you ask the backend, then it asks the database, it responds with something, and you get the front end. With a headless setup, you have most of the time everything pre-rendered, so the content is ready, and you instantly get the response of the page you’re trying to get, which then reduces the time to get the information, and you get it much faster. So it just helps you build a super fast website, so you can have an instantly loading website across the globe. So it’s not about your local market. It’s possible to target a global market and have this instant website loading across the globe, which is good for international businesses. For example, startups, SaaS companies that don’t know where they will sell. As a SaaS company, you don’t know where your customers can come from. So you need to have a website that is loading fast in different markets. If you’re targeting specifically, you can have a host server in that state or country. Of course, you can have CloudFlare on top, you can have caching, you can have everything with a traditional type, which will help you, but it won’t help for the first visitor. So again, if you have different users from different markets, and for example, we’re in Serbia, but our clients are in the US, and we host a website in Serbia, then our client from, let’s say, California will get our website loading the first time slower than the second client or the second time he visits our website. He’ll get it faster, but will he visit our website a second time if the first visit was like

ten seconds? Probably not. And then if you’re targeting California, then the second visit is okay, but what if you have a visitor from Washington or New York? You cannot be ready for all that. And then on top of that caching, you should have some pinging servers, something like that. And you cannot be sure completely what is possible with a headless setup. It’s possible to have instant loading across the globe. I can say we recently did some tests for our client, and we had the results. So they had a custom-coded website, so their website on 4G was loading something around three seconds, which is good on average, across five continents. So the website was on average loading within three seconds, something like 2.98. But then we tested on our other client that is using headless, and they have results which are 1.4 seconds average across the same locations.

Robert:
So twice as fast.

Darko:
Yeah. So 1.4 seconds is super fast.

Robert:
So my question is, and I’ve had this conversation about just regular, regular and both headless WordPress, I assume budgets are a little higher and time to develop is a little higher than just spinning up a regular WooCommerce. Would that be fair to say, or have you guys optimized it?

Darko:
There are challenges like that. If we are talking about standard e-commerce, standard WooCommerce, I don’t think that costs too much. But usually, businesses that go to a headless setup have custom API integrations, have ERP in the backend, have CRM, and have several other marketing tools integrated into their setup currently, and they want to make a switch to headless. So they’re like big businesses. They’re not starting from scratch. Initially, you need a lot of things to be integrated and tailored to their needs, and that is why it usually costs a lot. But even with a traditional stack, that still costs a lot because you have a lot of different things that need to be connected, and that is something that affects the price. But what is positive about the headless is that if they go into a headless setup, they can save money on hosting, they can improve user experience, they can improve scalability. The flexibility is huge. You can adjust your website to do whatever you imagine it to do. So there are no limitations.

Robert:
And that website can be a mobile app as well.

Darko:
And yeah, you can use WooCommerce as a database, but usually in those setups, WooCommerce is not a database. ERP is a database, but you have WooCommerce to control the content. You can control that content, which can go to e-commerce. For example, we have a client who asked us to do something with categories in WooCommerce. They have a product page, and they want to have dynamically generated content. So they go and click some product filters, let’s say it’s a clothing e-commerce website. They go to categories, click outdoor, and then go to sneakers, and select under $100. They click all that in filters and get a dynamically generated page that says sneakers up to 100. Under that, they have “check our sneakers offering that is perfect for outdoor activities and less than $100.” That can be the product page title and subtitle. When you change from outdoor to indoor, you get a different URL with sneakers for up to 100 for indoor activities. All those URLs for Google are indexable from one setup. You can have hundreds of pages that all get indexed in Google and get you real traffic. You’re offering a great user experience to your users because they see the title, the description, it’s in the meta description. So everything is done on an advanced level, which is not possible with a traditional stack. It’s not about WordPress WooCommerce, it’s not possible on any technology. With headless, you can do this. The time you save in content population or administrating those pages is where you save a lot of money, and your return on investment is bigger, the bigger the brand you are.

Robert:
I guess tying it to the original question, this isn’t for everyone, it’s not going to be for a freelancer selling their own t-shirts necessarily. It’s really for, I’ll use enterprise loosely, but a business where revenue and performance really do matter. Would that be fair to say?

Darko:
Yeah. In the e-commerce space, it’s important for businesses that are across one country or one state that do business across one continent, I would say. They can have a bigger return on investment. Also, businesses that are entering the e-commerce space and want to compete with bigger players. Bigger players are hard to make that switch. It’s expensive, it’s time-consuming, and they don’t know if that will work. But smaller players who want a piece of the cake can get that piece much faster if they go into some technology like this. They can win some positions in Google, they can win more clicks on Google ads for the same money. I would say it’s important, but with smaller businesses, the budget can be smaller. You can build a good solution and then scale faster because it’s scalable. You can add more. The backend can be independent of the front end, so you can add more things in the front end, but also you can scale your backend while the front end is the same.

Robert:
One point I want to make sure we don’t miss is obviously we’ve mentioned performance, SEO, SEM, all the acronyms, security.

Darko:
Well, security with this setup is on another level. This is like, as I said, you have this decoupled architecture. Your front end and backend are completely separated, and because of that, you have a front end that is more secure by just, most of the time, having only read-only access. So you get the API and show the data and details. It’s not possible to write something in. The front end is on a completely different server, and you pull the data from the API from some ERP, so everything is shown on the website. Because of this architecture, it’s more secure. The backend can be hidden from users and accessed only by some security protocols. Because of that, users or malicious users cannot access your backend. This is just one layer on top. You still need to protect your WordPress and your WooCommerce, but this is one layer on top which prevents users from getting access to your backend.

Robert:
I’ve seen that in WordPress where you’re drafting more static pages and obviously security is greatly improved by that, by having fewer vectors of attack.

Darko:
Yeah, the attack surface is reduced, so it’s not impossible, but it’s harder. Nothing is impossible. If someone invests a lot of time in something, they can do it from the application side or the hosting side. So nothing can be 100% sure and secure. Working on improvements all the time is important. For example, for all our backend activities, we have by default enabled two-factor authentication for all our users. We have two-factor authentication for every password that is shared. So we take care of security internally and even on the website level. Customers need to take care of their security too. Keep passwords in their password manager, have their users use two-factor authentication, force them to use a mobile app where they have two-factor authentication set up, not just in the password manager. But in the end, it’s the responsibility of all parties involved.

Robert:
Without a doubt. As we all know, security is always more and more important because there’s more money, there’s more personally identifiable information, all the problems that occur, and that’ll always improve at both ends. I’m more curious, of course, I have to say the AI word. What does the future of headless WooCommerce or WooCommerce in general with AI look like?

Darko:
Well, I think if you use it to do some things better, if you write… sometimes I play with AI, so sometimes…

Robert:
Oh, we all do, right?

Darko:
It’s so annoying chatting with ChatGPT or anything. It’s not AI yet, they’re trying to sell us that as AI. But I think if you use it for some, there’s some good applications, and it depends on how you set up your store to improve your operations. You can use it for data entry or some operational things, freeing up people to do more complex tasks. AI currently isn’t capable of doing some super-advanced things, so we still need people. What’s the future of WooCommerce with AI? This doesn’t have too much to do with WooCommerce. Headless WooCommerce is the same. I would say that you can, for example, probably, the thing that I explained about product categories, you could generate content on those pages based on some filters. If you get personal details about users, it’s more likely for them to like that content in order to click the product they want to buy, let’s say something like that.

Robert:
No, that’s fantastic. I know everyone’s looking at figuring out how they can use AI. I like how you actually very much said LLMs are not AIs. That’s a really good point. I think people forget that. I’m curious how upgrades in translations will affect especially multinational WooCommerce sites. I think that’ll be interesting to see how that comes to pass, since I know that’s sort of on Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress timeline.

Darko:
I think if you reach some limits inside your WooCommerce, it’s important to know that there is an option to go with headless because then you don’t have those limitations. I haven’t reached those limitations with the headless websites we’ve built so far.

Robert:
That’s fantastic. Darko, how can folks connect with you and learn more about getting started with headless WordPress?

Darko:
For those interested in headless WordPress or headless WooCommerce, they can find our website at IntellRocket.com. They can find us on LinkedIn, they can find me on LinkedIn, and they can just reach out, ask what they’re curious about, and we can provide them with a consultation or anything they need.

Robert:
Darko, thank you so much. It was great to learn about your perspectives, especially about headless WooCommerce.

Darko:
Thank you, Robert. Thank you for having me on this podcast, and I hope we’ll see each other at some WordCamps.

Robert:
Absolutely. And that’s another Do the Woo AgencyChat. Thank you. Thank you.