Six months ago we decoupled a content-heavy WordPress site: WP as the CMS, Astro on the front. Last week we quietly went back to a theme. Here’s the honest accounting.

What was genuinely better

Lighthouse scores you don’t have to fight for, a component model the front-end team loved, and previews deployed per branch. None of that is nothing.

Where the complexity landed

Everything WordPress gave us for free became our problem: previews, redirects, sitemaps, embeds, image sizes. Each one is a solved problem — but now they were our solved problems, spread across two repos and a webhook.

The verdict

Headless is a staffing decision, not a performance one. If you don’t have a dedicated front-end team, the theme is the better architecture.