Losing Your Head

Today I am giving a brief presentation at our Minneapolis St. Paul WordPress User Group about our experiment with “headless WordPress.” We recently built a site that needed to stay super-simple for users while incorporating a back end for managing images and comments. We also wanted the site to eventually turn into a static website with no back end at all. Our solution was to build the front end in React and use the WordPress API to provide a connection to a WordPress install that could manage the incoming images and comments.

My slides for the presentation tell the basic story. Since the demo is not really available online, instead you can visit the Sharing Rob site that inspired this solution (please don’t add anything there unless you knew Rob). Another resource to explore might be this introduction to headless WordPress with React.

One of the really nice features of this solution is that as soon as we want to “freeze” the site and stop further contributions, all we have to do is put a static version of the file returned by our API call onto the website. Once we do that, we can remove every trace of WordPress (except the static uploaded image files) and be left with a site that requires no updates or maintenance.