Why Choose Gatsby WordPress for Jamstack Website Development

Jamstack Technology is like the flavor of the month in the tech industry with its benefits and uses in website and app development. The Jamstack technology of development led the world with the idea of a de-coupled approach that was based on connecting the back-end and front-end through APIs and this is core or this technical architecture of the development. The technology grasped the attention of many companies specially web-development companies who had a threat of losing their market with this revolution in the industry promising speed, security, SEO traffic, and google ranking that most of them were lacking.

Decoupled Approach in JAMstack Website

The Jamstack technology brought together the SSGs with the headless CMS approach. This decoupled approach of website development has several benefits as mentioned below.

3x Speed: The static frontend working freely without the Database load attached to it. The load time greatly affects the views of the website as well as the customer conversion rate.
Enhanced Security: The static front-end and back-end connected through APIs make the website immune from SQL injections.
Cost Efficient: The dynamic websites require website compatibility with the technology stack that is not the case with the decoupled approach. The websites based on a Static Site Generator can be hosted on any server.

Gatsby as Static Site Generator

Conceptually static site generators came very strongly in the market when the drawbacks of the traditional website development through CMS were creating a hike due to some lacking in certain technologies. Especially when Google was ranking the website with better speed and traditional website development was struggling with speed and security.

Gatsby has been found as one of the finest SSGs with many additional benefits that have been developed using ReactJS. It is individually only the front-end of the website where you can have the theme and the view of the website, while it has been powered by the GraphQL APIs.

What is a Static Site Generator?

The literal definition of a static site generator is that it creates the HTML pages from the components or templates. If you compare it to the dynamic systems the static site generators require a back-end that has the website content and REST APIs. The Static Site generators like Gatsby have been designed on modern technology libraries like React using GraphQL APIs. Jekyll is another commonly used static site generator in the market but it does not have a convenient environment like Gatsby using WordPress backend through GraphQL APIs.

How does Gatsby works?

Gatsby as a static site generator is not limited to its definition. Here we will get into detail about how it works and why it provides the benefits we have been hearing about for a long.

Improvised Web: For a long, the websites have been lacking in a few minor things that have been exaggerated by time since speed, security, maintainability, appearance, accessibility, and cost has been amongst these few factors. The modern stack website development tool plays with the website and the extended features that have been offered promise quality of the website by working on all these lacking previous tools.
Building a Higher-level Building Blocks of the Website: components of HTML, CSS, and JS are the most common building blocks of today’s websites. Like always technology will revolutionize and while looking back at these components after about 7-10 years, we will find them as an assembly language. Gatsby is crafting a higher-level language in this perspective by using the React components like Gatsby-link and Gatsby-image. React is also simple JavaScript but use its libraries and combine the HTML codes and other library components with unlimited options like adding Bootstrap simply into the React code.
Creating Content Mesh System: Over the years the websites and applications have been building on Monolithic Architectures based on the setup of Content Management Systems to the modular system of the content mesh by getting the functionality and content from multiple sources. But the challenge they have been facing is the pragmatical integration of all these pieces. While on the other hand, the goal of Gatsby SSG is to create a more cohesive content mesh knitting together the modular tool in the content model with search, authentication, analytics, UI frameworks, and payments.
Fun with Website Development: Simplicity and exclusiveness make the website development fun and learning at the same time. The latest technology that is being implemented in the system using the Jamstack architecture is redefining and reefing the roles of the employees like front-end developer is more interested in the design and user interface issues rather than the back-end like content and more. The proper tooling can be felt very clearly by the designers, developers, copywriters, and marketers.

Philosophy Behind Gatsby

You might be wondering how these benefits work within this Static Site Generator and how it will work with the modern stack programming languages.

Modern JS for Web Content: by bundling the ecosystem of modern JavaScript, Gatsby is making the web content of higher quality through advanced performance in splitting bundle, prefetching the asset, supporting offline, optimization of image, and server-side rendering. In addition to it providing good developer’s experience through React and Webpack transpile providing security and accessibility all together.
User Experience: The term used to make the web apps easier to learn and minimize the error-prone by most UX designers is Progressive Disclosure. It simplifies the experiences of people without limiting user abilities. Progressive disclosure is performed by making features like Gatsby-image, modifying the Babel config or web pack, opt-in, Gatsby-link, and more.

Open-Source Community of Gatsby

The actual reason for the success of Gatsby is it being an open-source community where the strength is its community and ecosystem making it progressive each day. It is open for everyone where people can open an issue and millions of people technical and non-technical will respond. It has been found that Gatsby developed a number of its features through this emerged conversation. If you get a chance to see the old conversations on Gatsby, you will realize that the issues reported on them have been resolved turning out to be one of the features of Gatsby. The open-source communities help the developers in many ways;

Great looking body of work and experience.
Referral network of jobs
Sustainable Income source

WordPress as Headless CMS

A simple and traditional content management system is the application for managing the website content by saving it to the DB or a file for accessing it at a later stage. Some of the commonly used CMS are WordPress, Contentful, Drupal, etc. When we refer to a content management system without a front-end, we are referring to the headless CMS.

What is Headless WordPress?

The WordPress CMS is a visual editor for the back-end approach for the website, you can use it simply like a regular content building platform like for any dynamic website. Headless WordPress generates JSON returning from the REST APIs for use at the SSGs as HTML files. WordPress allows the users to create content, edit it and attach images, etc with the categories and pages for the clients like Gatsby for parsing JSON.

From a non-technical perspective when you are building a website using WordPress, when you enter content, create the page you have a theme and a view available where you can see how it will look from the end-user interface on a browser. But when you are referring to headless WordPress it means you don’t have any user-view of the browser where you can see how it will look it from the end-user.

Why using Headless WordPress?

The WordPress CMS is also an open-source platform that provides a great level of flexibility for building a website. WordPress when used as headless allows the users to create the front-end of the website on any of the technology and that maintaining the content on the same CMS. You can build any website for businesses like E-Commerce and Blogs with features in the simple CMS you have long working on with advanced technology features like attaching ReactJS with Php.

WordPress as a complete package can create dynamic websites but also can be used using modern stack development technology like Jamstack architecture by using it as headless and connecting it through the static site generators using REST APIs like GraphQL APIs.

GraphQL APIs

Creating any difference with the technology is sometimes simple and easy but sometimes you do not proceed due to the lack of resources you have and the complexity of the website. APIs are the bridge between the headless WordPress and Gatsby Static Site Generator, your SSG requires you to pull content from headless WordPress so GraphQL acts as that liaison between the two editors. There are different approaches for using them

You can use GraphQL as your private API by using Gatsby-source-GraphQL
If you are unaware of GraphQL, you can treat it as unstructured data and fetch it while building the website using Gatsby.
You can also create the source plugin.

What is GraphQL?

The GraphQL acts as the core and the center of the strong schema that is composed of types and fields that can be well defined as the scalar. Have you wondered what it stands for? Let’s break it up

Graph: is the Application Data Graph
QL: is the Query Language

So as an elaboration it is the Query language that is used for interacting with the Graph of App Data. WordPress GraphQL is the extendable schema of API and GraphQL that can be used with the headless CMS to create headless CMS and Static Site Generator website. It helps in creating the declarative query best suited to the client's needs as a response. This gives the client complete control over the application or website. It provides efficiency by fetching what is required only and this feature makes the front end fast and secure. It is capable of bringing multiple data from a single source and follows the references smoothly and efficiently.

While a traditional REST API will be requiring a round-trip request to achieve the endpoints. GraphQL, on the other hand, is specified as a featured Query Language. The GraphQL use of WordPress ensures that your data is not written back to the server with no verification required from the requester who is capable of creating the posts.

Content through GraphQL

You can build your site page when the APIs pull the content in Gatsby-node.js. Once the data is fetched it can be made available for any query with GraphQL. The source API gets the data and Gatsby uses that data to infer a schema of GraphQL API. The function of GraphQL is to run the arbitrary queries against the local schema of WP GraphQL.

Furthermore, the WordPress GraphQL is the build of PHP library and it is used to provide extendable and executable schema and also resolver for the website built on WordPress.

Conclusion

The technology is very helpful not only for the technical people but also for some of the non-technical people who have been struggling for solutions for their business problems. Although management is the actual decision-maker for developing a website on WordPress and the Static Site Generator.

Gatsby WordPress templates are a low-code solution that provides security speed and scalability to the websites that promise higher Google ranking, increased SEO traffic, and higher conversion rate. All these benefits have been grouped together in the no-code platform of Stackground offering easier and convenient solutions for building Jamstack websites. There are several themes and web templated best suiting the business and individual needs. The plugins built on the platform offer all the functionalities as required by the industry.

You can install Gatsby and start building a website by connecting the headless WordPress through GraphQL APIs for your business. The decoupled website approach is a simple solution using the Git repository to pull and push the code. You can fetch all the images from headless WordPress and get them displayed on the static site.