[Guidance] Tradeoffs between Wordpress (PHP) <> Frontity <> our existing React setup w/Next.js

[mcopley]

Hi, I’m the CTO of a hospitality company and we’re considering using Frontity to rebuild our current website in Wordpress. As the project manager for this there’s a few things that make me nervous and would be great to hear the community’s input on:

1. How will Wordpress look different to our Marketing team if we build the website using Wordpress as a headless CMS w/Frontity vs. using a Wordpress template in PHP entirely (no react)?

2. Our SEO contractor is worried that we won’t be able to use Wordpress plugins if built with Frontity, but seems like there’s a theme called “Nude” for this purpose exactly. Will this allow us to use WP plugins with no restrictions?

3. We’ve built our bookings engine for our website using react-native-web and Next.js, will our current infrastructure play well with Frontity? What would be the tradeoffs if we built in-house using our existing setup w/the Wordpress REST API vs. using Frontity?

Thanks,
Michael

[Pablo]

Hello @mcopley and welcome to the community!

It’s great to hear that you are considering a migration to Frontity.

@mcopley

How will Wordpress look different to our Marketing team if we build the website using Wordpress as a headless CMS w/Frontity vs. using a Wordpress template in PHP entirely (no react)?

This is a great question, and it is also one of our obsessions, using Frontity shouldn’t impact the marketing / content teams. That being said, there’s still one feature that we have to release to make this 100% smooth: Post Previews. Good news are that this is a priority and it shouldn’t take long. If you are curious, take a look at this thread where @luisherranz shares his research: Does Frontity support Wordpress post preview?

Apart from the preview, you’ll have to review the plugins that your marketing team use, and see if they still make sense.

@mcopley

Our SEO contractor is worried that we won’t be able to use Wordpress plugins if built with Frontity, but seems like there’s a theme called “Nude” for this purpose exactly. Will this allow us to use WP plugins with no restrictions?

Regarding SEO, you are covered. We have released a WordPress plugin to add support for Yoas and All in One Seo Pack. You can take a look at the documentation here: https://docs.frontity.org/frontity-plugins/rest-api-head-tags

In addition I also invite you to take a look at this article, where we talk about SEO for Headless WordPress.

Regarding using any WordPress plugins with no restrictions, it really depends on each plugin. Some of them don’t make sense, others work out of the box and others need a bit of work.

@mcopley

We’ve built our bookings engine for our website using react-native-web and Next.js, will our current infrastructure play well with Frontity?

If you already have experience building and deploying a Next JS application, then it should be easy for you to deploy Frontity in a similar infrastructure. Indeed, we recommend using now to deploy frontity: https://docs.frontity.org/deployment/deploy-on-now

@mcopley

What would be the tradeoffs if we built in-house using our existing setup w/the Wordpress REST API vs. using Frontity?

You could develop a react fronted for WordPress from scratch, but there are many technical challenges to solve before getting it right. I invite you to take a look at our list of features, I guess that one of the most difficult ones is the SSR. Is also important to mention, that using Frontity you have a team 100% dedicated to maintain and keep improving the framework, so you can focus on your core business.

I invite you to take a look at our About us page, so you can have a better understanding of the origins of the project. I think it can help you understand all the value that it’s embedded in the framework.

Hope this helps! Feel free to reach out if you have more questions

[mcopley]

Okay great, appreciate the thorough response Pablo! This gives us a lot of info, I’ll look into the resources you linked with our engineering team here soon