Take your WordPress to another level with Gatsby

Gatsby presented a week ago its plugin that allows complete integration of Gatsby with WordPress. So you can continue to use WordPress as the fantastic CMS that it is, and use React as a front-end to offer the best web experience to your users. Take your WordPress to another level with Gatsby

That is why in today's article we will review why companies like Facebook, Bluehost and Apollo have integrated Gatsby with WordPress to create fast, secure, accessible, scalable and easy to update web experiences.

Benefits of integrating Gatsby with your WordPress website

Fast and safe

Optimizing your website in WordPress to improve performance and protect the site from attacks is possible, but it is also expensive and requires constant maintenance. On the other hands, a WordPress website decoupled with a front-end like Gatsby results in a very fast website from the first moment, sure to have the entire front-end compiled and cheaper to host, since the code of your website ends up being static. Also, with some extra plugins, you can enable Progressive Web App (PWA) functions on your Gatsby / WordPress website, among other functions.

Custom-designed integration

This new plugin, gatsby-source-WordPress 4.0, is designed and developed for complete integration with WordPress and as a result, you can get all the content managed in the WordPress CMS and transfer it to your new Gatsby project. When adding the plugin and configuring the end-point of your WordPress, WPGraphQL will generate all the content to be able to have it available in your React components.

Another of the great novelties that explains very well the great integration that the WordPress team and Gatsby have made is in the management of metadata, necessary for the optimization of your website in search engines such as Google. To achieve this, you only have to have the popular WordPress Yoast SEO plugin for managing the CMS and the corresponding WPGraphQL extension for Yoast SEO makes the metadata available to configure your Gatsby. But that's not all, we also have the corresponding WordPress plugins to integrate with WPGraphQL:

Advanced Custom Fields: To modify the type of content and fields of the CMS.
Polylang: To manage the translation of the CMS content.
WooCommerce: And also WooCommerce! The famous eCommerce plugin for WordPress.
among others…

I think that seeing the effort and synergies between these plugins, CMS and framework, are key factors for the guaranteed success of the integration of WordPress and Gatsby.

Smooth content management

The purpose of any content management system (CMS) is to facilitate content editing, regardless of the technical capabilities of the different roles involved, which is why using WordPress as a CMS will make it easier for your content or editorial team to manage content. web, without fear of deconfiguring or unmaking any web page.

With this new integration and the use of hosting solutions like Gatsby Cloud, your content team can have a “preview” to verify the result before sending the content to production. It's a great solution to avoid errors, wait for your website to compile, and provide a smooth publishing experience.

The best of Gatsby on your WordPress

With this integration, you will be able to replace many of the WordPress plugins with Gatsby plugins. For example, to optimize your WordPress images you may use plugins such as EWWW or Smush, and in Gatsby, you will find Gatsby Image, a cutting-edge plugin that will automatically transform all images at compilation time using performance best practices. Additionally, WordPress performance, caching, or security plugins become obsolete as the public website for your clients becomes Gatsby and not WordPress.

Conclusion

The WordPress teams, Gatsby, and other plugins have worked very hard to result in one of the most important integrations that the world of web development has had. With the integration of WordPress with Gatsby, the fastest and most secure front-end solution is combined with the most popular CMS.