Create a headless WordPress with Gatsby

WordPress is widely regarded as one of the most popular content management systems in the world.

In fact, as of late 2021, WordPress powered 35% of the top 1 million websites in the world. Thats remarkable!

Why is it so popular?

First and foremost, its free to download and use. However, if you want to customize it, WordPress does charge a fee for their templates and plug-ins.

Beyond being free, WordPresss ubiquity means if youre a content creator on the internet, youve probably used it before.

And if you havent, thats no problem because its extremely user-friendly. Plus, its versatile enough to not only work as a great as a blog, but for many different possible projects.

Downsides to WordPress

However, there are serious downsides to using WordPress.

One is security simply because its so popular. The logic used by hackers is, if its popular, it makes more sense to figure out how to hack inside. Then, once discovered, the process can be repeated.

Another downside is that WordPress sites have slow download times. That means the audience is waiting for the site to load and could become disinterested and leave. Their use of redundant code and heavy themes certainly hurt their sites speeds.

Finally, the necessity of plugins is a third drawback. Using many plugins at once will result in lethargic loading times. On top of that, many crucial plugins are only accessible by paying a yearly subscription fee. That means your free site is now much more to operate a year.

Solution: Headless WordPress

Luckily, theres a way around all of those issues we just illustrated above.

Its called a headless WordPress.

Headless might sound scary, but it just refers to using WordPress to manage the content, but a different framework to display the content.

For this example, were going to use Gatsby for many reasons.

Gatsby, being a static site generator, is not only faster to load than a WordPress site, but its also easier to update and well suited for SEO optimization.

One of the best parts of static site generators is their ability to pre-render a site. That prefetched data means not only a fast initial visit and download of a site, but using the site is much smoother and more responsive to the visitor as well.

That prefetched data also helps with SEO because with SPAs (single page applications), a blank HTML page from the server. Thats because the page is rendered in real time in the browser.

On the back end, single pages and applications can still be made with React and the site and all its pages are prerendered and sent to the server. So, after that initial visit, the site actually acts more like an SPA.

Also, security is improved by using a headless WordPress and specifically, Gatsby because the static site generator means theres no data stored on servers. Theres no reachable database as Gastby explains in their technical documentation.

Finally, Gatsby allows you to take that information from WordPress and integrate it in many customizable ways across an entire site. That means using other CMS or web services, too.

Use Gatsby, host on Fathym

If youre a blogger or have any kind of content-based site using WordPress, you may want to break free. Gatsby is a truly free option to run a headless WordPress, and then you can even host that site on Fathym for free (to start before upgrading).

Because Gatsby is much faster than traditional WordPress sites, its a better user experience and theres a possibility your site will be faster than the competitions too.

Join Fathym

Transfer your WordPress website over to Fathym today and try it out for free with Gatsby. And once you see the improved speed and user experience, we have a feeling youll stick around.