Glossary Terms

WordPress architecture

WordPress architecture is the set of structural decisions that determine how a site is built, deployed, and scaled: the content model (which custom post types and taxonomies organize the content), the server stack (PHP, the database, the web server, the caching layers), how the plugins and business logic are organized, and how the front end is delivered. There are three broad approaches: traditional, where PHP renders the pages from a theme; headless, where WordPress becomes a content API behind a separate React or Next.js front end; and hybrid, mixing server-rendered PHP with JavaScript for specific interactive parts. These choices are hard to reverse once content and integrations are built on top of them, so they deserve a deliberate decision at the start of a project rather than being inherited by accident.