About Wix-Managed Headless

Wix-managed headless is the recommended path for building headless projects on Wix. Wix hosts and runs your frontend and connects it to Wix business solutions, handling builds, deployments, scaling, and security, so you can focus on building. When building with Astro, which is the default when scaffolding with AI or the Wix CLI, Wix's Astro integration handles automatic authentication and SEO, and lets you add extensions.

Unlike self-managed headless, you don't set up hosting or manage infrastructure.

For a working example built with Wix-managed headless, see wix-headless.dev.

Create a project

Wix-managed headless projects are built with Astro by default, and Wix's Astro integration handles authentication for you. Choose the quick start that matches how you want to start:

• Quick Start with AI: Describe what you want to build and let your AI agent scaffold and deploy a fully managed project. The fastest way to start.
• Quick Start with the Wix CLI: Scaffold a new Astro project from your terminal.
• Quick Start from an Existing Astro Project: Link an Astro project you already have.

You can also send a Claude Design build directly to Wix.

Whichever you choose, your new project appears in your Wix dashboard alongside your sites.

Benefits

Every Wix-managed headless project runs on Wix infrastructure:

• Managed hosting with global CDN: Wix builds, deploys, and serves your project on a global content delivery network with automatic SSL certificates and deploy previews. The infrastructure scales automatically to meet traffic demands.
• Secrets management: Securely store and manage your project's environment variables and secrets.
• Analytics tracking: Track events like page views, cart actions, and purchases, and forward them to connected analytics platforms such as GA4 and Facebook Pixel.
• CLI: Preview, release, and manage your project from the terminal, useful for both manual and AI-agent workflows.

Wix's Astro integration

Wix's Astro integration adds three capabilities on top of the managed infrastructure:

• Automatic authentication: Visitor sessions, member login, and token management are handled for you, so you can call Wix SDK methods directly with no client setup.
• SEO support: Main pages get their dashboard-managed SEO tags injected automatically, with no code, and Wix serves robots.txt and sitemap.xml for you. Item pages take a small amount of code. See About SEO Support for what's available.
• Extensions: Add extensions for custom backend logic and dashboard UIs.

To learn more, see About Wix's Astro Integration.

Comparison with self-managed headless

Self-managed headless gives you full control over your framework, hosting, and authentication setup. Wix-managed headless trades some of that flexibility for a faster, more automated development experience.

For a detailed comparison of both paths, including a feature-by-feature table, see About Headless Development Paths.

See also

• Quick Start with the Wix CLI
• About Wix's Astro Integration
• About the Wix CLI
• About Headless Development Paths