Headless WordPress Overview | Real World Headless WordPress Example

Headless WordPress has advantages and disadvantages. In this video, I go over some of those as well as what I would do given a real-world scenario.
*Don't forget to subscribe!*
*Link to slides*
slides.com/alexyoung-2/wcslc-...
*Plugins*
WPRocket: bit.ly/2WGijfg
Yoast SEO: wordpress.org/plugins/wordpre...
CPT UI: wordpress.org/plugins/custom-...
ACF Pro: www.advancedcustomfields.com/...
Query Monitor: wordpress.org/plugins/query-m...
Short Pixel: shortpixel.com/
EWWW: wordpress.org/plugins/ewww-im...
Smush: wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smus...
WooCommerce: woocommerce.com/
Gravity Forms: www.gravityforms.com/
Regenerate Thumbnails: wordpress.org/plugins/regener...
Signup for the newsletter to get notified of the 2020 Free WordPress Course: wpcasts.tv
*SOCIAL*
Twitter: / alexanderbyoung
Instagram: / the_alex_young
Facebook: / wpcasts.tv
#Headless #WordPress #GatsbyJS

[@WPCasts]

Don't forget to subscribe and let me know what you'd like to learn about more in the future. Thanks for the support everyone!

[@STMZY]

Hello wpcasts. How would you go hosting a web app with react and wordpress headless ?

[@21scottgibson]

Great video. As a WordPress newbie I really appreciate the thorough breakdown of pros and cons for vanilla vs headless wordpress, was having trouble finding answers to this elsewhere.

[@JerryNordstrom]

Very well done! You just saved me a lot of time trying to explain the high level concepts between headerless CMS and traditional wordpress.

[@jamesmarx3105]

Was super keen to just use Headless. Thanks for clearing up what the use case should be for it. Really Helpful !

[@tomwallace6250]

Awesome content! I’m a recent bootcamp grad and have never worked with Wordpress or GraphQL before and I just accepted a position as a UX developer for a company that uses a tech stack very identical to the one you just described and this video combined with a few of your others gives me a confidence boost on what to expect. Thank you ! Keep it up !

[@TimHerbert509]

Been a WordPress developer since 2014 but stepped away to finish my bachelor's degree. This stuff is new to me so these videos you have are very informative. I plan to try to implement one on my new portfolio site. Thanks for the info!

[@alimazing]

Thank for the clear explanation. 🙏 I was searching for "headless wordpress vs custom theme"

[@jackwalsh6487]

I really like your channel. Great work, concise explanations. Your voice is pleasant to listen to. Thanks for starting this channel!

[@mechantgarcon6262]

Crystal clear explanation! Very useful!

[@rubiotv]

Glad you uploaded this. I wasn't able to make the WordCamp.

[@tby4242]

Super interesting and easy to follow! Thank you!

[@realsakul]

Thanks for the overview! Learned a lot!

[@softwareadministrato]

Awesome video, great work!

[@lukedharrison326]

This was really informative, many thanks sir!

[@saidsel-lam2300]

Thanks! This content is great for a newie like me

[@shehwar-ahmad]

Time to first byte (TTFB) is a metric for determining the responsiveness of a web server. It measures the amount of time between creating a connection to the server and downloading the contents of a web page

[@LevyCarneiro]

Suggestion: a video about image optimizers, why you are moving to Shortpixel, etc. Thanks !

[@timothyleelong6295]

Thanks for the video. I am doing research on building something similar but with Next.js and an out of the box CRM. This was helpful.

[@WPCasts]

Glad it was helpful!

[@victormendoza3295]

Great video, sounds cool, but I am under the impression right now that this is way overkill. I wanted to do serverless/headless WordPress, but now I am geared more towards the LAMP stack now with CDN. Thanks for setting me straight.

[@jatinkukreja18]

How can I give this a 1000 likes ? Love it !

[@gabrielmstowski1827]

Hi, thank you for the video. It's very valuable. I have a question for you, have you met with this technology for WooCommerce online shops ?

[@tomaspadilla7581]

Thank to you sir, i have been studying web development for about 7 months now, i am starting to read about backend, but i believe this is a nice approach to make some real world experience ! One little question , how about deploying? Being wordpress and gatsby different. Thanks once again!

[@moshemo613]

Have you looked into any of the static wordpress hosting solutions -- like Shifter, HardyPress or Strattic? If so, how do they compare to a wordpress - Gatsby integration.

[@sabuein]

Thank you so much.

[@nervanis]

What about alternative data sources like Airtabel? Also, Netlify has build hooks so there may be a way to trigger a build when data changes on WordPress or another data source.

[@alexkey9372]

done both. for small projects definitely traditional way. for bigger projects headless wp is a no brainer.

[@lordpepa1715]

Hey WPCasts. Love your vids man! I'd be keen to see a video on your workflow, for developing vanilla WP sites in particular. Headless is what I'm aiming for but for now im just a dirty cowboy coder trying to get gud. I've started using git as well as Gulp or Webpack for sass and all that fun stuff. My problem is once a client's WP site is live, I can no longer build pages, add images or make any html changes locally without replacing the live database. I spent 4 hours today doing a 30 minute task because I was tip-toeing around the DB trying to not replace their form entries or Woocommerce sales. I had to build a private page on the live site, add my page elements, pull it to my local development, add my scss or js, I'd forget something and have to go back to the live site, make changes, pull the db down again and I'd have to repeat that process over and over. Maybe this won't be an issue for other projects where the whole site is built before going live? Either way id love to hear what the best practices are to improve my workflow. I'm using local by flywheel, WP synchro to pull the DB and git to push the code to cPanel. Sorry for the long noob comment!

[@andreyyastrebtsov4367]

LordPEPA same story here bro( I am also aiming for headless, so I don’t have to suffer once the client’s site is live

[@johnmarmumar2339]

Great content! Question, can I still have vanilla Wordpress frontend while using headless?

[@josuebarros-desenvolvedorw2490]

is it good for using with NuxtJS/Vue?

[@watchernode6138]

Learning to convert a HTML theme into Wordpress Theme can be useful, since so many plugins and other features are so tightly coupled to frontend. Most end users will not like when plugins and other features don't work out of the box. Better to make a custom Backend in Laravel with API, if you want to go Headless.

[@n4870s]

Hi. Thanks for the great videos! What are other alternatives to getsby? Is it possible to create Vue or React webapps which have predefined static pages (SEO friendly?). Can we not have central WP which acts as WPGraphql server and exposes the API to other WP instances, which act as web/mobile apps etc?

[@WPCasts]

Thanks! It is definitely possible to use other frameworks instead of Gatsby. Gatsby in this example is what I would choose given the scenario. You could absolutely use something like Vue or React. Yes, you would have a WPGraphQL server that's only job is to be the source of truth and have other WP instances read from it. Great question.

[@arsalanshaikh3763]

Great video Sir really well explained just had a query is it a good idea to use woo commerce in a headless setup. Have a dashboard for managing products and analytics and a PWA for store front. Thanx

[@WPCasts]

I think that could definitely work. You wouldn't be able to take advantage of the payment gateway stuff that WooCommerce gives you, but using it simply to manage products and orders, would be awesome.

[@_dominikdominik_]

You didn't mention user authentication. And a lot of WP sites let users/customers log in and do stuff. There's a couple of plugins like JWT Auth, OAuth, but they mostly let you just use basic WP user/pass authentication. Nowadays we need Facebook, Google auth which require a lot o work upfront, like extending JWT Auth plugin (which additionally is not the most secure thing) and writing alot of backend user creation/login logic by yourself (whereas in Vanilla WP you have things like Nextend Social Login - which doesn't support rest api auth unfortunately). So in terms of real-world authentication with social accounts etc headless wordpress sucks for now. But if you need just publishing site with no authentication on frontend, or you can stick to just wordpress user/pass authentication things like GatsbyJS are no brainers. PROVE ME I'M WRONG, I'll be more than happy to see headless wordpress site with social auth etc :D Great video anyway, I've had similar conclusions.

[@WDTin]

This may be a bit late question to ask, but let me first thank you for your work effort and time Great Video very informative and I am gonna try it myself, But before I do i have to ask what about Craft CMS instead of WordPress? , Btw i am a kinda newbie and learner who greatly appreciate your thought, thanks again

[@turok3637]

Interesting

[@murphytwin]

Would you use a headless approach to publish content to multiple publications or is that overkill?

[@WPCasts]

That’s a great use case. I would definitely do it

[@nicolaskeith8872]

Alex: if I wanted to have a central "hub" for data for all my price comparison sites, would this make sense to use?

[@WPCasts]

Yes, it would!

[@StickyPlasters]

This is what I'm hoping to use it for. I could use woocommerce api's to add them as products, however many of the results will be retrieved at the time the user does the query, so its not possible.

[@TheOfficialABHS]

I have been looking for a new solution since WordPress went away from being a CMS and became a page creator software. I tried Drupal, looked at Joomla, too steep a learning curve. I have been investigating Static website generators lately. Might work, but probably not for me. I'm old school. I was leaning towards a bespoke HTML, CSS, and MySQL site. I hired a developer for our main site, I am just working on creating a user training site. Not too complicated. I think a headless WP site might work out just fine.

[@petrprochazka5796]

My friend displays sites in Yandex, says some raccoon global is with him like everything is done at once, maybe who knows?

[@interestingtidbits5283]

where/how would you host and deploy the wordpress portion of your example?

[@WPCasts]

I would put it on a cheap Digital Ocean droplet and deploy with either Git or SFTP.

[@mattfelton2451]

11:00 headless wordpress

[@hummingbird7579]

why no mention of frontity?

[@WPCasts]

I wasn’t aware of frontity at the time of this recording. Looks really promising tho

[@alihusain9033]

Please create new videos on integration API's with WordPress.

[@Alonso-o-Santi-2.0]

Hi! Why don't sell your udemy course about headless? I will buy it! I'm from Costa Rica. My best wishes! I love your work on WordPress. I am trying to learn this from scratch :)

[@WPCasts]

I'm definitely thinking about it.

[@Alonso-o-Santi-2.0]

@@WPCasts Good news for you. There is not any good course about WordPress headless on udemy. :) But we need it from scratch haha.

[@IvanJuras]

Hey, would you consider creating some vids on Vue + WP? I think Vue is a much better choice for most of us not coming from the bullshit React world :D

[@rustonemperua5382]

Yeah, would be better using Gridsome

[@halfsmoke]

Lmao Wayne Gretzky

[@conurvibes]

Where's the example??? This is just a ppt

[@twmcmahan]

Curious... at this point, what's the advantage of using wordpress?? Seems just as easy to build something custom using php/python, or even a framework like laravel so you don't have to rebuild the wheel completely.... and avoid all of the wordpress quirks, and admittedly poor database structure.