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+---
+title: Should you have a separate front-end for your Drupal website?
+date: 2025-01-27
+permalink: daily/2025/01/27/separate-front-end
+tags:
+  - software-development
+  - drupal
+  - front-end
+cta: ~
+snippet: |
+  Should you have a separate front-end for your Drupal website?
+---
+
+A few years ago, "decoupled" or "headless" Drupal was a popular approach, leveraging Drupal's built-in JSON:API module to expose its data via an API which can be consumed by a separate front-end application.
+
+The front-end application would retrieve the data from Drupal via the API and generate the appropriate HTML.
+
+It's an approach I've used in the past and [spoken about at conferences][0], but it comes with pros and cons.
+
+In theory, as the Drupal (or back-end application) and front-end are completely separate, there can be two separate and independent teams working on them.
+
+This adds overhead and complexity and I've found that one team will commonly be blocking the other instead of both being able to work in parallel.
+
+As I said yesterday, [previewing content in Drupal can be an issue][1] - particularly with a decoupled approach which needs a front-end to be rebuilt before the changes can be seen.
+
+If you have a separate front-end, you'll need to create everything from scratch, such as writing accessible HTML markup and othe standard features that would normally be provided by Drupal and, because you've got two separate front-end and back-end applications, you've got twice the amount of maintenance.
+
+You could also be excluding yourself from any new features that will be available in future versions of Drupal or Drupal CMS, such as the new Experience Builder.
+
+Whilst decoupled/headless builds are a viable option and can work well in some situations, it's not something I recommend often.
+
+[0]: {{site.url}}/presentations/decoupling-drupal-vuejs
+[1]: {{site.url}}/daily/2025/01/26/layout-builder