Tutorials

Google Analytics is powerful analytics software. A common way to use it is to just slap the JavaScript snippet on every page template you have and let it collect basic data about unique visitors and pageviews and such. That’s useful, but it’s also the bare minimum. Say there is an…

I believe that a traditional WordPress theme should be able to work as effectively as a static site or a headless web app. The overwhelming majority of WordPress websites are built with a good ol’ fashioned WordPress theme. Most of them even have good caching layers, and dependency optimizations that…

This post was in progress before Automattic acquired Frontity and its entire team. According to Frontity’s founders, the framework will be transitioned into a community-led project and leave the project in “a stable, bug-free position” with documentation and features. Like other open-source community projects, Frontity will remain free as it has…

(This is a sponsored post.) I did a sponsored video the other week explaining how to build a paid subscription newsletter using WordPress (we did it on WordPress.com but it could be hosted anywhere), MailPoet (a plugin to visually author the emails, as well as send them), and WooCommerce (to…

Frontity is a WordPress-focused React-based server-side dynamic-rendering framework (phew!) that allows us to create fast headless websites. Chris has a good introduction to Frontity. I guess you could think of it like Next.js for WordPress. And while the demand for headless WordPress sites may be a niche market at the…

And maybe an optional follow-up if you’re up for it. Automattic, the makers of Jetpack and many other WordPress-y things, have sponsored my site (me = Chris Coyier; site = CSS-Tricks) for quite a while. I use Jetpack myself, and I’m always trying to tell people about its features and…

Have you already tried using WordPress headlessly with Gatsby? If you haven’t, you might check this article around the new Gatsby source plugin for WordPress; gatsby-source-wordpress is the official source plugin introduced in March 2021 as a part of the Gatsby 3 release. It significantly improves the integration with WordPress….

I wonder where headless WordPress will land. And by “headless” I mean only using the WordPress admin and building out the user-facing site through the WordPress REST API rather than the traditional WordPress theme structure. Is it… big? The future of WordPress? Or relatively niche? Where’s the demand? Certainly, there…