WordPress Gatsby

A curated list of resources about WordPress as a headless CMS with Gatsby as a Static Site Generator (SSG).


A headless CMS is a back-end only content management system (CMS). Its purpose is to serve content and make it accessible via an API (e.g. REST or GraphQL).

A Static Site Generator (SSG) is a framework or setup, that helps you to generate static websites (HTML/CSS/JS). The source of your data can be anything from local files (e.g. text files or markdown) to APIs (e.g. REST, GraphQL).


Why Gatsby and WordPress?

WordPress is one of the most used CMS in the world and therefore many people already know how to work with it. The typical front-end approach with PHP-based templates is getting more and more problematic in an environment where performance is key. The approach to use WordPress as a headless CMS with normal API calls through JavaScript already exists, but also has the downside of having to make requests to the server and rendering depending on the response. This adds time to load. Gatsby instead, pre-renders the whole site at compile time and therefore the user gets a fully prepared static site on their first request, making it one of the best approaches for performance. Another huge benefit is security, as your WordPress instance can be anywhere, even locally and you don’t need to expose any of it to the user. The static Gatsby site therefore, is not hackable. Find further arguments for pros and cons in the resources below.

Contents

Communities

If you need help with anything, there are some highly active communities.

WPGraphQL - Slack Chat - Spectrum Chat - Twitter

Gatsby - Discord Chat - Reddit - Stack Overflow

Articles and Talks

List of articles and talks that elaborate on the technology stack in general.

Plugins

List of useful plugins to make WordPress and Gatsby work together. Ordered alphabetically.

WordPress

Essential Plugins

WPGraphQL Extensions


Extensions for that use other plugins with WPGraphQL

Other helpful Plugins

Gatsby Plugins

Free Tutorials / Courses

Note: Since the release of gatsby-source-wordpress V4, it is the preferred over gatsby-source-graphql and therefore I will only list tutorials related to that approach.

Written Tutorials

Video Tutorials

List of paid courses.

Starters

List of project starters, that you can clone and start building upon.

Themes

List of gatsby-themes that work with WordPress as a source, which you can use in your Gatsby setup.

Contribute

Contributions welcome! Read the contribution guidelines first.

License

CC0

To the extent possible under law, Henrik Wirth has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.