I have been developing on WordPress for over the past decade. While there certainly have been advancements with PHP and MySQL, I caught wind of a new way of developing websites while still leveraging the power of the CMS we know and love, WordPress.

Welcome the world of the “Headless CMS”. This practice completely decouples the frontend of WordPress from the backend. In theory this will help to prevent serious security issues, all while providing advancements in flexibility and scalability.

I wanted to set out to learn some new technology and to finally modernize my website. After researching, I decided that I was going to build a site using React JS, Gatsby JS, Tailwind, WP GraphQL, and of course WordPress. While there was certainly a learning curve at first, I was surprised at how easy modern web development is using React combined with the speed performance from a static site generator like Gatsby was unreal.

I am very appreciative of Google, GitHub, and all the technology documentation across the various companies. After a few days of scratching my head, everything started to make sense and the development process is improving. I can’t wait to keep on learning, this is just the start of something very exciting! To get started, check out the video below!