We're excited to have our new website launched! It was way overdue but also something that will be a continual work in progress. We'll be updating here as we continue to embrace this new site and new strategies for our own content and brand.
Under the hood
I'm currently writing this blog post in WordPress. But, if you were to inspect this page, you wouldn't see anything you'd expect to see from a WordPress site.
In a traditional site managed by a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, the frontend of the site (the part that you're viewing right now) is directly tied to the backend (where the content is created and edited). They live on the same server within the same application.
Our new site is headless.
This means that the frontend is completely separated from the backend. Yes, I am writing this blog post in WordPress, but you're not accessing this content via WordPress. You see, this website is a fully static site. You're seeing a simple HTML file being served up by our Netlify server. When we update or add new content in WordPress, these static pages are built, pulling JSON data about our content from WordPress and creating static HTML files that are served up to you!
Our framework of choice for this frontend? Astro.
But what does it all mean?!
This might not mean anything to you, and that's OK! For us, it means flexibility for content and data sourcing, super fast site loading, and an overall more secure website.
Flexible content sourcing
The flexibility in data sourcing is one of my favorite parts! For this site we are:
- Sourcing data for blog posts from our old WordPress site for LimeCuda
- Sourcing pages from a new WordPress site where we have Gutenberg and Kadence working together to make building pages with our new layouts quick & seamless. The data for the blocks is pulled into components for each within our Astro project.
- Case Studies driven by raw JSON files. No real reason... I just wanted to test it out with Astro's content loader. And it works great! JSON isn't a language you really write in. But, in this case, I don't hate it and it lays a foundation which allows us to pull a case study from almost any builder application we may choose to adopt.
Speed
Since the files we're serving up don't have to pull data from a server, that instantly reduces the load time. This, along with the optimized components for serving images and delivering assets provided with a framework like Astro, makes building fast websites much easier than fighting cache settings in a conventional website.
Better security
Since the site accessed by the public is detached from the application managing the content, there isn't a direct link between them. In a traditional site structure, the code presenting the frontend is all included in the potential attack vector for accessing your primary site application.
Ready to go headless?
Wondering if this headless stuff might work for your website too? Drop us a line and we'll chat about whether it's a good fit for your project – no pressure, we're just web nerds excited to talk shop.