Incredible Plugin for Headless WP Projects

Before WPGraphQL existed, the only way for a decoupled frontend app to communicate with a headless WordPress backend was via the REST API. While that works, the single-resource-per-endpoint pattern that REST APIs use is not ideal for many modern frontend applications. If a particular page requires data about users, pages, posts, taxonomy terms, etc. you may end up sending a number of separate requests to various WP REST endpoints. In some cases, you even have to wait until some requests complete in order to use the data in their payloads to fire off further requests, or take the time to build many custom endpoints. All of this adds complexity and increases page load speeds.

Enter WPGraphQL. It exposes the data in your WordPress backend as a single, unified data graph. Your decoupled frontend app can then enter the data graph at any point and use the fields and connections available in the GraphQL schema to get exactly the data required for the current page – nothing less, nothing more.

Have a page where you need to query for users, then for each user, get the first three posts that author wrote that are in the “Engineering” category? Not a problem – WPGraphQL can run a performant query to fetch and return all of that data in a single HTTP request.

WPGraphQL has become my preferred solution for building headless WordPress sites. It is empowering many in the community to build impressive and lightning-quick single-page JS apps, while still providing their content creators with the excellent content management experience that WordPress is known for. Highly recommended.