How to Build a Headless WordPress Site with Eleventy

September 9, 2024

Table of Contents

Building a Headless WordPress Site with Eleventy: A Comprehensive Guide

Headless WordPress offers unparalleled flexibility and speed for modern websites. By decoupling the frontend from the backend, you gain the power to build custom experiences with frameworks like Eleventy, a popular static site generator. This guide outlines the process of building a headless WordPress site using Eleventy, empowering you to create a dynamic and performant website.

1. Setting up WordPress as a Content API

The first step is to configure your WordPress installation as a content API. This involves:

Installing the REST API plugin: The official WordPress REST API plugin enables you to access your content through a structured API endpoint.
Configuring API permissions: Ensure that your API is protected and only allows authorized users to access your data.
Choosing a content format: Decide on the format you want your content to be delivered in, such as JSON or XML.

2. Creating a New Eleventy Project

Next, create a new Eleventy project to serve as the frontend of your headless site. You can initialize a new project using:

npm init -y
npm install @11ty/eleventy

This will set up a basic Eleventy project structure with the necessary dependencies.

3. Connecting Eleventy to Your WordPress API

The key to using WordPress as your headless CMS is to fetch your content from the API. You can achieve this using the following methods:

Fetch API: The native browser Fetch API allows you to make requests to your WordPress API.
Axios: A popular library offering a more robust and user-friendly approach to making API requests.
Eleventy plugins: Consider plugins like @11ty/eleventy-fetch to seamlessly integrate API requests into your Eleventy builds.

Example using @11ty/eleventy-fetch:

// In your Eleventy template
const data = await fetch('https://your-wordpress-site.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts');
const posts = await data.json();

This code will retrieve all posts from your WordPress site and store them in the posts variable.

4. Building Your Eleventy Frontend

With your WordPress content accessible, you can now design and build your Eleventy frontend. This involves:

Creating templates: Utilize Eleventy’s templating engine (Nunjucks by default) to define the structure and styling of your website.
Fetching and displaying content: Implement logic within your templates to fetch and display the retrieved WordPress content.
Adding custom features: Leverage Eleventy’s powerful features and plugin ecosystem to add functionalities like server-side rendering, image optimization, and more.

Example Eleventy template:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <title>{{ post.title.rendered }}</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>{{ post.title.rendered }}</h1>
  <p>{{ post.content.rendered }}</p>
</body>
</html>

This template displays the title and content of a fetched WordPress post.

5. Deploying your Headless WordPress Site

Once you’ve finished building your frontend, you can deploy your site using a variety of methods:

Static site hosting: Choose a static site hosting provider like Netlify or Vercel to host your Eleventy generated HTML files.
Cloud services: Consider using platforms like AWS S3 or Google Cloud Storage to deploy your site.
Custom deployments: Set up your own deployment pipeline using tools like GitLab CI/CD or Jenkins.

Conclusion

By combining the power of WordPress as a content backend with the flexibility of Eleventy as a frontend framework, you can create dynamic and performant headless WordPress websites. This approach offers a blend of ease of content management and a custom, SEO-friendly frontend experience, making it an ideal solution for modern websites. As you explore the possibilities of headless WordPress and Eleventy, you’ll find a world of opportunities to build engaging and functional online experiences.