New plugin maintains WordPress authoring experience while delivering better site performance and security

Gatsby, Inc., creators of the GatsbyJS open-source project, announced general availability of the Gatsby Plugin for WordPress. The Plugin is available for download and is fully supported in Gatsby Cloud. Using Gatsby as the frontend and WordPress as the backend CMS, organizations can increase onsite conversions and purchases by securely delivering great visitor experiences. Gatsby as a frontend delivers much better performance than traditional WordPress sites while retaining the familiar WordPress authoring experience for content editors. For organizations with complex websites, Gatsby can deliver richer, more complex, integrated web experiences that combine content from WordPress and other CMSs and web services.

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Gatsby Together with WordPress

Gatsby integrated with WordPress can deliver a high performance web frontend, resulting in lower visitor bounce rates, higher visitor satisfaction, and more engaged customers. With Gatsby as a frontend static site generator, WordPress sites are transformed into static HTML at build time. Static HTML sites load exceptionally fast, improving Lighthouse scores and potentially resulting in higher search rankings and more organic site traffic. Gatsby sites load only critical parts of each page to minimize load times and prefetch resources for likely next pages so visitors navigating the site will experience accelerated delivery of the next page.

“I am thrilled to see the 1.0 versions of WPGraphQL and Gatsby’s WordPress source plugin because they offer the best way to integrate WordPress and Gatsby together,” said Jason Bahl, creator of WPGraphQL. “The ultimate goal is to make the Gatsby build process an afterthought, giving developers built-in performance, security and SEO out of the box.”

“I think Gatsby with headless WordPress might be the perfect intersection of developer happiness and content manager efficiency,” said Asa Smith, software engineer for Verizon Media.

Content creators enjoy the same WordPress authoring experience they already know. After content is published in WordPress, Gatsby sources the updated content and generates the static HTML pages. WordPress developers can now use modern development tools and technologies like Javascript, Git, and modern APIs to create richer, more performant web experiences.

Traditional WordPress sites may be vulnerable to server-side attacks. Sites using Gatsby as a frontend have no active web server and no reachable database, thus presenting no attack surface. This approach prevents malicious requests, DDoS attacks, and accidental exposure.

The Gatsby Plugin for WordPress leverages WPGraphQL to enable organizations currently using WordPress to create highly performant, secure Gatsby web frontends. WPGraphQL is a free, open-source plugin for WordPress that delivers an extendable GraphQL schema and API, which Gatsby leverages to use WordPress as a headless CMS.

The Gatsby content hub architecture built on GraphQL can access content from web services and CMSs, including WordPress, utilizing the rich library of over 2,500 Gatsby Plugins. This enables organizations to create complex, fully integrated web experiences based on content from multiple data sources.

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Gatsby Cloud and WordPress

Gatsby Cloud is a cloud-native solution for building and publishing Gatsby sites to any Content Delivery Network (CDN). New and existing Gatsby Cloud users can use the new Plugin for WordPress immediately. Organizations can connect Gatsby Cloud to any WordPress site in minutes.

The Gatsby Preview feature in Gatsby Cloud delivers a first-class experience for content editors, providing real-time previews of content changes. The Gatsby Cloud Incremental Builds feature rebuilds only pages which have been modified – with a typical build time of seconds – and deploys those updated pages to the CDN immediately.

“We love using Gatsby for the great developer experience and ahead-of-time compilation, but our customers really love the preview and publishing experience in WordPress,” said Caleb Barnes, frontend developer at Bare, a digital media agency. “Because of Gatsby Cloud, our clients can preview their posts before they publish. Once they publish a blog post, it’s accessible to visitors immediately – not twenty minutes later.”

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