Use WordPress as Backend for AstroJS Website

If you’re like me, you’ve probably spent countless hours working with WordPress and appreciate its robust content management capabilities. But let’s face it – sometimes you want the flexibility and performance of a modern frontend framework like AstroJS. Good news! You can have the best of both worlds by using WordPress as a headless CMS with AstroJS.

Why Choose This Setup?

Think of it as combining your favorite chocolate with your favorite ice cream – it just works beautifully together. WordPress brings its battle-tested content management system and user-friendly admin interface, while AstroJS delivers lightning-fast performance and modern development features.

Setting Up Your WordPress Backend

First things first, we need to prep our WordPress installation. It’s like setting up the kitchen before cooking a gourmet meal – everything needs to be in the right place.

1. Install and configure WordPress as usual
2. Enable the WordPress REST API
3. Install and activate the necessary plugins
   • Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) for flexible content structure
   • ACF to REST API to expose your custom fields
   • JWT Authentication for secure API access

Configuring AstroJS

Now comes the exciting part – setting up AstroJS to fetch data from WordPress.

Here’s a real-world example of how to fetch posts from your WordPress site:

---
const WORDPRESS_API_URL = 'https://your-wordpress-site.com/wp-json/wp/v2';

const posts = await fetch(`${WORDPRESS_API_URL}/posts`)
  .then(response => response.json())
  .catch(error => console.error(error));
---

<div class="blog-grid">
  {posts.map(post => (
    <article>
      <h2>{post.title.rendered}</h2>
      <div set:html={post.excerpt.rendered} />
    </article>
  ))}
</div>

Best Practices and Tips

Remember these key points to make your WordPress-AstroJS integration smooth and efficient:

• Cache API responses to minimize requests to WordPress
• Use environment variables for API endpoints
• Implement proper error handling
• Consider using TypeScript for better type safety
• Optimize images through WordPress before fetching

Deployment Considerations

When deploying your hybrid setup, think of it as managing two separate but connected systems. Your WordPress installation can live on any traditional hosting service, while your AstroJS frontend can be deployed to modern platforms like Vercel, Netlify, or CloudFlare Pages.