Developing modern web applications with the React library and WordPress

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the use of headless WordPress together with the React library. And to develop a Gatsby starter that will be published to GitHub for anyone to use. Trough the investigation this thesis aims to solve the following issues: 1) Word-Press sites are very intricate which can lead to unnecessary bloat, ultimately making the site slow. 2) Using WordPress for sites that only use a small amount of database-driven content and are otherwise static, is excessive. First the main technologies used are discussed. Next, it is explained how the technologies are used in the development of the starter site. This the-sis should give the reader enough familiarity with the technologies to develop a similar site themselves. It is not a full-fledged guide for the different technologies and only the specific tools used will be presented in the thesis. The thesis proved that the starter developed offers a serious alternative to the standard way of developing WordPress sites and gives solutions to the issues the thesis aims to solve.