Download the Open Source WP GraphQL WordPress Plugin: https://www.wpgraphql.com/

If you need help you can Find An Expert: https://www.wpgraphql.com/find-an-expert/

Turn your WordPress Server into a GraphQL Server that Enables an Endpoint at domain.com/graphql.

WordPress Static Site Generator With Gatsby Js and WPGraphQL WordPress Plugin – Everything You Need To Know

If you love paying attention to what the latest thing in web development is, you must have heard a lot about Gatsby Js and WPGraphQL lately. Gatsby Js is a great way to create a shiny static site and it comes with killer features that can pull content from many different sources such as WordPress sites.

What is Gatsby Js?

Gatsby is a modern static site framework built on React. Gatsby also uses all the great and dynamic features that React has to offer and it never limits you to static content. You can think as Gatsby as replacing a theme because it works as the WordPress site’s front-end. However, it doesn’t live in a plugin or WordPress theme; it is a separate app that helps to pull in WordPress data through an API.

Any modern Javascript developer will love it because it is easy to install and run a local development environment with Gatsby. The great thing about Gatsby is that it is crazily fast, and that includes a free/cheap hosting account. It can also not be hacked because we are only outputting static HTML files here. To cap it off, Gatsby is easy and fun to work with.

What is WPgraphQL?

WpgraphQL is a WordPress plugin. It is a free open-source Wordpress plugin that you can install in your WordPress site and it will turn your WordPress site into a graphQL server. What that means is that it would enable an endpoint so you’d have your site dot com slash graphQL.

This plugin will allow you to use the graphical query language to interact with WordPress. Gatsby uses WPGraphQL to handle data. This plugin is superior to WP REST API in flexibility and speed.

WPgrapQL Vs WP REST API

REST API folks use REST API to get data to WordPress or send data to WordPress in JSON format. Rest is resource-based, so you would have an endpoint per resource. If you want to interact with post data, you would have a post endpoint, tags or categories. Each has its own endpoint user’s comments. They all have their own endpoints and you can hit an endpoint and get a payload of data.

Getting up and running with REST is pretty quick but GraphQL is different in that when you get to one endpoint, it defines a schema of what’s possible and then you the consumer get to decide what resources you want to ask for.

For instance, you can write a query in GraphQL say you want to ask for posts and on the post, you want the ID in the title and maybe you also want resources like the author of the post and the featured image of the post. You can ask for all of that.

With GraphQL, you can do all related resource requests in a single request and it’s faster to do. Unlike GraphQL, REST API will just send you the entire resources even if you don’t need it. For instance, if you only need post IDs and Titles but not the content, REST will process the content too and ask you to download the entire content stream, which could be lengthy.

GraphQL is faster on multiple facets but in both cases, you’re still dealing with JSON data. So the main difference is that as a front end developer, the REST API will send you everything you need and those you don’t need, but GrapQL will only send you what you requested.

A developer can hop into a codebase six months from now and look at graphQL query and if something’s not working, they know the intent of the person who wrote the code because graphQL query is so explicit, unlike REST API. For another developer to edit data on REST, it will take a lot of time while editing data on graphQL is so easy and fast.

There is another feature in graphQL called fragments. This is a big advantage of graphQL compare to REST API. Fragment allows you to define specific sets of fields called fragments. You can use fragments inside a query. So it is what you can do in like component-based architecture such as react single-page apps.

You can build a fragment for a specific component. For instance, you can query a list of posts and on each post, you want the author’s first name, last name and avatar. You could define a fragment called the author and on the author fragment, you can ask for the author’s first name, last name and avatar. And you can keep that fragment inside the same component that renders the author information.

Higher up in your application, you will have a component that’s responsible for the list of posts or the single post. And that component can import the author component and the author fragment to allow the author component to control the data that it renders. So over time if your manager comes to you and says, hey, we also need to put the author’s email address, you don’t have to go through your whole application to figure it out. You just go straight to the component and edit markup that’s going to render email address and you ask for the first name, last name and then add the email address to the fragment and your query automatically adds that next time your application runs. You can also easily delete anything following the same process.

How Does WPgraphQL and Page Builder Work Together

Since most of the page builders are registered on the server, they should be able to read the register blocks or elements and map it to WPgraphQL schema in some ways and blocks of WPgraphQL. So WPgrapQL builds what’s called a union, which allows you to list things you want and write fragments. You can say on layer one, I want these fields, on layer two, I want these fields and so on.

In the past, there is a level of unpredictability but graphQL brings predictability back. It shows that WPgraphQL is extendable and its developers can start pulling in other parts of the WordPress database and query. For instance, you can do something randomly like hooking up Elementor page builder to WPgraphQL.

What Are The Advantages Of Using A Headless Approach?

By going headless and using Gatsby, your eCommerce site could have a bigger customer base that you didn’t have before because Gatsby makes your site load faster than Woo Commerce. There is also a possibility that we would soon see WordPress themes and Gatsby themes work together in the future.

Currently, if you are doing stuff with Gatsby in WordPress today, there are two ways you could be doing it. There’s Gatsby resource of WordPress which uses the WordPress REST API to consume data and pull data into Gatsby and then Gatsby would convert that into a graphQL API and you would consume and then write graphical queries to talk to Gatsby cache and build your Gatsby template. That all worked with the WordPress REST API and it is faster.

Gatsby works with the REST API and analyzes the JSON that it got and converts it into a graphical schema.

What to expect from Gatsby in the future?

In the nearest future, you can expect no code death feature from Gatsby. If you also have no knowledge of coding or you don’t want to write codes, there will be themes that you can just click a button and install. You should also expect the benefit of dynamic and static websites, and much more. WordPress is great but Gatsby makes your website load even faster.

Common Questions:

Is Gatsby JAMstack?
Is JAMstack the future?
What is Netlify used for?

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