I recently built everydaydigital.co.nz, a business website designed to be fast, flexible, and easy to manage.
Rather than building the site as a traditional WordPress theme, I used a headless architecture. The front end was built in React, while WordPress was used as the content management system in the background. This allowed me to keep the familiar WordPress editing experience, while the public-facing website could be built as a modern, performant React application.
To connect the two, I used GraphQL to query content from the WordPress API and the GraphQL WordPress plugin. This meant the React front end could request only the data it needed, structure it cleanly, and render pages dynamically.
The result was a site that combined the best parts of both worlds: the flexibility and editing experience of WordPress, with the speed, structure, and developer experience of a modern React application.
Some of the key areas of the build included:
- Creating a reusable React component structure
- Setting up WordPress as a headless CMS
- Querying WordPress content through GraphQL
- Building a clean, responsive business website
- Separating content management from front-end presentation
This project was a good example of how WordPress can still be incredibly useful in modern web development, especially when paired with a custom front end. It gives businesses control over their content without locking the entire website into a traditional theme-based approach.
For me, the most valuable part of this build was creating something that was simple to maintain, and extremely well optimised, while still giving me the freedom to build the front end properly.
To check out the project, here’s a link to the repository: Github: Cactusman07/everyday-digital
