Building a Headless WordPress Site with Gatsby

Building a headless WordPress site with Gatsby might seem like an exciting fusion of flexibility and speed — and in some ways, it is.

But beneath the appeal lies a fundamental truth: going headless with Gatsby means turning WordPress into a pure data source and rebuilding the entire frontend from scratch. There is no magic bridge, no theme compatibility, no quick toggles. You’re cutting off the display layer entirely and starting over in React. For developers who like to live dangerously and clients who can tolerate (or afford) full custom rebuilds, this might be acceptable. For the rest of the world, it often leads to compromise, corner-cutting, and eventual regret.

Headless Hostman was born out of that pain — designed specifically to deliver static performance without abandoning your theme, plugins, or editorial workflows. Unlike the Gatsby + WordPress stack, which demands you reinvent everything from your header to your 404 page, Headless Hostman believes in a simple truth: WordPress should work out of the box.

Understanding the Headless WordPress Architecture

The Decoupling Process

To use Gatsby with WordPress, the first step is to strip WordPress of its traditional purpose — displaying pages. Instead, WordPress becomes your content backend only. You use the REST API or GraphQL to extract posts, pages, custom fields, and menus. Nothing from your WordPress theme survives the cut. Every visual, functional, or navigational element must be rebuilt in Gatsby using React components.

This is a paradigm shift that many developers underestimate. Instead of extending your site, you’re dismantling it and starting over. WordPress becomes a CMS without a face — and everything forward-facing is now the responsibility of Gatsby. You’re no longer just customizing a theme. You’re writing a frontend from zero.

Fetching Data with GraphQL

Most Gatsby-based headless projects rely on the WPGraphQL plugin, which adds a GraphQL server to your WordPress installation. This allows Gatsby to fetch content in a more structured, efficient way. You’ll configure gatsby-config.js to point at your WordPress source, define queries, and rebuild your static site during every content update or scheduled deployment.

However, this adds a new layer of complexity. Now you must learn and maintain GraphQL schemas, troubleshoot query errors, and build resolvers for any custom content types or relationships. It’s powerful — but it’s not simple. And it’s certainly not native to how WordPress was designed to work.

The True Cost of Going Headless with Gatsby

No Themes, No Plugins, No Shortcuts

Forget everything you’ve installed in WordPress to make your life easier. Elementor? Gone. Yoast breadcrumbs? Useless. Contact Form 7? Doesn’t render. That beautiful theme you paid $100 for? It’s now a screenshot — useful only as reference while your developers try to mimic it in JSX. The moment you decouple, your WordPress stack becomes a ghost town of admin panels and plugin settings that have no frontend counterpart.

Manual Rebuilds — Forever

Gatsby doesn’t understand how WordPress renders a post. It doesn’t know about custom loops, sidebars, pagination, or template hierarchy. You must code all of it by hand in React. Want to change how archive pages look? Build that template from scratch. Need breadcrumbs? Write your own resolver. Want to support ACF Flexible Content? Map every field manually. And when your content editor adds a new layout or changes a field, be prepared to modify your Gatsby templates again — often with a full redeploy.

These rebuilds don’t end after launch. Every new content pattern or client request becomes a development ticket. You’re locked into a permanent cycle of frontend catch-up — and your WordPress backend is just along for the ride.

Rebuilding the Frontend: Gatsby from the Ground Up

React Components Instead of Templates

Gatsby uses React as its foundation, which means you’ll be rebuilding every WordPress page type as a component. This includes headers, footers, menus, post listings, single post views, search pages, 404 pages, archive pages, and anything else your site might have used out-of-the-box. Even the most basic behavior — like displaying a post title and content — has to be implemented manually via GraphQL queries and JSX templates.

Handling ACF and Custom Post Types

ACF, one of the most popular WordPress plugins, isn’t supported natively in Gatsby. You’ll need to install the ACF-to-REST-API plugin or extend WPGraphQL with custom fields. Then, you’ll query those fields in Gatsby and write logic to display them based on field type. It’s not “plug and play” — it’s “fetch and render.” If your client changes the field group or layout, your frontend breaks unless you keep up with those changes in Gatsby.

Deployments and Previewing Content

One of the biggest editorial pain points in the Gatsby stack is content preview. Gatsby builds a static site. So previewing a draft post or unpublished update means spinning up a parallel preview environment, running a custom webhook, and deploying preview versions of your frontend. Most editors don’t want that. They want to click “Preview” in WordPress and see the changes — instantly. Gatsby doesn’t support that natively, and workarounds are always technical.

The Performance is Real — But So is the Tradeoff

Gatsby Delivers Speed

There’s no question: Gatsby sites load fast. Static HTML files are served directly from the CDN. JavaScript is precompiled. Lazy loading and code splitting are baked in. When you visit a Gatsby site, it feels lightning-quick. That’s one of its core strengths — and the reason people suffer through its headaches. If speed is your absolute highest priority and you have the budget to rebuild and maintain every piece of the frontend manually, Gatsby might fit.

But Maintenance is a Long-Term Burden

Over time, your custom Gatsby frontend becomes a liability. Every feature request, every layout change, every plugin you want to support — it all has to be recoded. There’s no theme update, no plugin tweak, no shortcut. You own every line of the frontend, and that ownership carries weight. For agencies, it means higher retainers or deeper burn. For internal teams, it means your development backlog never clears. Performance comes at a cost — and that cost is permanent.

Where Headless Hostman Shines

Static WordPress without:

• Rebuilding your frontend
• Sacrificing Plugin functionality
• Spending thousands on React/Nue JS developers

Headless Hostman was built to offer all the benefits of static performance — speed, security, scale — without the cost of a full rebuild. You don’t have to rewire your site. You don’t need to abandon your theme. You don’t have to duplicate layouts or rebuild features. You just keep using WordPress the way it was meant to be used — and Headless Hostman turns your site into a fast, optimized, static experience without breaking anything.

Preserve Your Theme and Plugins

Unlike Gatsby, Headless Hostman doesn’t strip your site down to JSON. It keeps your theme and plugin output intact. Whether you use ACF, Elementor, WooCommerce, or anything else — it works. There’s no need to rebuild headers, footers, or loops. What you build in WordPress is what gets published statically.

One-Click Deployments, Not Custom Devops

With Gatsby, deployment requires CI pipelines, GitHub Actions, and environment variables. Headless Hostman simplifies the process to a single click. You control your static rebuilds, schedule them, or trigger them on-demand. No GraphQL. No webhooks. No waiting for build queues to finish before your site updates.

Editorial Workflow Intact

Content creators don’t care about frontend frameworks — they just want their updates to appear.

Headless Hostman supports preview links, fast publishing, and keeps the WordPress admin fully functional.

Editors don’t have to learn a new system or wait on developers to push changes live. This is the way WordPress was meant to work — fast, intuitive, and free from technical debt.

Version Control for Static Output

Every static version of your site can be pushed to GitHub. Want to roll back a broken release? Need to see what changed?

You have full version control over every deployment. That’s something Gatsby developers often build manually — but with Headless Hostman, it’s built in.

CDN Hosting with Edge Performance

Like Gatsby, Headless Hostman serves your static site from a global CDN. But instead of rewriting everything in React, you get that performance layer instantly — no JavaScript refactor required. Your site is fast, globally distributed, and secure by default.

We’re the Best for Headless WordPress

And we can prove it:

• Headless Hostman vs. Gatsby for WordPress