The Observatory

Why WordPress is a great choice for Jamstack

In a previous post, we discussed Jamstack and some of its benefits. We are excited about Jamstack and what this means to our enterprise clients. We thought we would take some time to talk about what to do with their back-end WordPress environments. We say, keep them.  

We are big fans of WordPress, we not only use it, but we provide custom WordPress themes and implementations to many fortune 1000 clients. If you are not familiar with WordPress, it is a leading open-source CMS that powers almost 40% of the internet. WordPress websites measure in the 100s of millions, and it has over 50,000 plugins.  

Our clients want Jamstack for security, speed, and performance, but how can they transition? The good news is you can migrate your site to a Jamstack framework while keeping your back-end WordPress in place. 

• Jamstack still requires back-end functionality which WordPress can provide at a very low or free cost. 
• The ubiquity of WordPress means there are a lot of commercial off-the-shelf (COTs) available. 
• You still want to have non-developers working to keep your content SEO fresh.  
• The workflows and integrations on your WordPress sites are battle-tested
• Keep all of your existing content and calls to action (CTAs) in place.
• WordPress is a mature platform with a large ecosystem of readily available third-party software, including eCommerce, multilingual support, membership site functionality, and more.

Five critical steps for converting your website to Jamstack and WordPress:

1. Choose your framework and front-end host – Pick a framework for Jamstack and a comparable front-end host.   We mentioned several front-end options in our previous post. The front-end and back-end will be hosted separately for this configuration, so you must select a front-end host. We recommend Vercel or Netflify.
2. Pick your data fetching method – Determine your data fetching method; we recommend REST or GraphQL. REST is better for highly customized data structures. For most applications, we recommend GraphQL.  There also is a WordPress plugin to make it easy, WPGraphQL. WordPress has a native REST API, so there is no need for additional plugins. 
3. Evaluate your plugins – Since you are upgrading your site, this is an excellent time to evaluate all the plugins you are using on your existing site. You can remove any plugins offering front-end customization. WordPress will function to hold your data so that a stripped-down back-end will improve usability and performance. Before you perform the upgrade, make sure all of your plugins are up to date. Ensuring this will save you a significant headache when trying to connect your new front-end.
4. Build and connect your front-end – One of the most excellent parts of a JamStack app is that you can bring your own front-end (React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, etc.). The flexibility frees up developers to work with their preferred front-end library. We chose NextJs, Styled Components (CSS library), React-query (fetching library) for our migration.

Deploy, Optimize, and Enjoy

Jamstack sites are fast. The combination of static page generation, CDN served content, and rehydration allows sites to achieve blazing quick page speed scores. Before our migration to Jamstack, we had an image-heavy, optimized WordPress site. Even with minimized JS, optimized images, and page caching, our Lighthouse scores were never over 90.

After our migration to the Jamstack, our page scores are in the high nineties.

Now that you know more about the benefits of using Jamstack with WordPress, let us know if you’ve made the upgrade! Interested in building a world-class website on Jamstack?  Contact us directly at connect@carimus.com, or connect with us on our website at www.carimus.com!