By reducing your website complexity by being integrated with headless WordPress, Gatsby can provide enhanced performance and security to leverage site wide.
With its worldwide standing as the most popular CMS in use, WordPress is super flexible. Its open-source foundation easily allows you to use WordPress as a headless CMS.
A headless CMS separates the presentation layer from the content store and system. A traditional CMS integrates the front end and back end closely in the architectural layers.
WordPress remains one of the most popular content management systems powering more than 30% of websites worldwide. While it can be considered a database-driven system, the development of the Rest API has made it possible to transform the platform into a headless CMS. GatsbyJS is one of the fastest front-end frameworks to use with headless WordPress for various reasons. In this article, we will learn what GatsbyJS is, how to integrate it with your WordPress site and why the concept of a headless CMS opened a new page in website building.
GatsbyJS is a fast and reliable frontend framework powered by Jamstack for building modern websites and applications. As a static content generator, it provides an alternative to database-driven content management systems by generating HTML pages deployed during the build process. WordPress integration with GatsbyJS has made it possible for website owners to leverage all the headless architecture's benefits for making your WordPress site faster and more secure.
GatsbyJS relies on Jamstack as the architecture powering the static content generator. Jamstack employs Javascript, API, and HTML markup.
By default, WordPress utilizes PHP for building dynamic web pages, while all content is stored within the database. Web pages are rendered to the visitors by a web server after the requested data is retrieved from the database and merged with template files to generate an HTML page. This approach has been used for a long time and can be considered traditional and reliable.
Once the concept of a headless CMS was presented to the world and WordPress developed the REST API, website building became more flexible. You could choose another programming language to power your WordPress site, like JavaScript, which has gained popularity over the past years. Headless content management systems return structured data via an API, which means it returns JSON or XML that can be compiled and then optimized by GatsbyJS or any other front-end frameworks. Using Jamstack, you can even host your website without having a web server or database management system.
Using Gatsby as a Jamstack-powered static content generator to integrate with your WordPress site provides a wide range of benefits. Still, this approach also has its drawbacks that need to be taken into account. Let’s look at the pros and cons of the WordPress integration with GatsbyJS.
We can define the three main advantages of using GatsbyJS with your WordPress site:
While it seems like GatsbyJS could be a perfect solution for every WordPress website, several limitations can make you want to stick to the database-driven CMS which WordPress the default scenario.
GatsbyJS can help you create faster, more secure websites with reduced site complexity and lower costs. The platform is perfect for product demo websites and portfolios. In addition, dynamic websites often require database-driven architecture.
The process of WordPress integration with GatsbyJS is pretty straightforward and consists of three main steps:
Installing and configuring the GatsbyJS includes setting up our Gatsby environment and creating a new project. The official Gatsby plugin is a Node.js package, so to have it installed, you need to have Node.js (v14.15 or newer) and NPM installed in your environment. Gatsby also requires Git, so be sure you have the version control system installed.
The Gatsby Command Line Interface (CLI) is what we need to get started. It can be installed using NPM, as shown below:
Version 3 or newer is required, so once you install the Gatsby CLI, you can run the gatsby --version command to ensure you have the correct one installed.
Once we have the Gatsby CLI installed using NPM, we can install the Gatsby solutions for WordPress integration and create our first GatsbyJS project.
First, we need to install two WordPress plugins on our website, WPGatsby and WPGraphQL. The WPGatsby plugin optimizes your WordPress website to be used as a data source for the GatsbyJS. WPGraphQL helps you get started with GraphQL by providing the GraphQL schema and API for WordPress.
Once the plugins are installed, we can move on to creating a new GatsbyJS project. Run the gatsby new command to set up a new GatsbyJS website. Here the name of our new project directory is wordpress-site, but you can change it to anything you like. A new GatsbJS site will be created in the wordpress-site directory using the Gatsby starter template. Make sure to move to the new project directory before we can proceed with the Gatsby plugin installation:
Now it's time to install the Gatsby Source WordPress plugin. We will again use NPM for its installation:
Once we have the Gatsby Source WordPress plugin installed and the WPGatsby and WPGraphQL plugins added to our WordPress website, we can get a connection established between WordPress and the new Gatsby project.
Open the gatsby-config.js file using the preferred text editor and modify the url option to connect the GraphQL endpoint you created by installing WPGraphQL in your WordPress installation. By default, it would be https://your-wordpress-website/graphql:
The GraphQL endpoint is the only thing you need to add to the gatsby-config.js file. Next, it's time to run the gatsby develop command for the Gatsby Source WordPress plugin to fetch all available public data from WPGraphQL. It will only fetch the data that changed to keep builds quick on further builds:
That’s it! We have connected our new GatsbyJS project to our WordPress website. As a result, we can easily create new page templates and GraphQL queries that will be pulling data from WordPress.
GatsbyJS is a powerful static content generator that provides an alternative to the database-driven website architecture employed by most WordPress websites. Reducing your website complexity by being integrated with headless WordPress can provide enhanced performance and security to leverage. Additionally, you can set up your production environment and connect your WordPress website to a new or existing Gatsby project with the help of the Gatsby Source WordPress tool. After the connection has been established, you will get access to endless customization possibilities the front-end framework provides.
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