For starters you can keep using WordPress as the fantastic CMS it is, and use React and modern tooling for your front-end!
Some highlights:
- Increased security and performance due to the static rendering of Gatsby
- A componentized architecture for your front-end code with React (better maintainability)
- A simpler way of asking for data with GraphQL (no need to remember dozens of data retrieval functions)
- Client-side state management with React opens up the doors to creating an app-like or full on app experience for your users
- Gatsby is committed to ensuring we are as accessible as possible out of the box
Additionally, this plugin is a great reason to use Gatsby with WordPress. Many of the complex and difficult aspects of going decoupled with WordPress have been abstracted for you behind the scenes, so you can work on building awesome apps and sites instead of reinventing the wheel to get decoupled WordPress working in your project.
Check out this page on convincing developers why Gatsby is awesome. It's meant for developers who want to convince their coworkers to use Gatsby, but it actually does a great job of describing directly to you the main reasons why using Gatsby is a great idea :)
- ReactJS
- Gatsy Site Showcase
- Gatsby Case Study Blog posts
- How Tinder is using WordPress with Gatsby
- Zac Gordon on what Gatsby is and why to use it
Before gatsby-source-wordpress@v4 was released, there were 2 main ways to work with Gatsby & WordPress: gatsby-source-wordpress@v3 and gatsby-source-graphql.
Both of these worked but each had it's own pitfalls and problems.
This plugin fixes every problem listed in those two pages ☝️
Now we have the ability to properly cache data and this makes incremental builds, fast builds, and Preview work. Any WPGraphQL plugin now becomes a cacheable Gatsby plugin which means Gatsby and the community can build a rich plugin ecosystem around WordPress that just works! 😄