Introducing HeadstartWP: An Open Source, Nimble Framework for Headless WordPress Sites

Taylor Lovett on June 15, 2023 • 2 Comments

Drawing from lessons learned building and supporting dozens of headless sites for our clients, 10up architected HeadstartWP: a jumping-off point for decoupled builds, powered by WordPress and Next.js. HeadstartWP delivers premium 10up craftsmanship with time-saving efficiencies for developers. In keeping with our commitment to giving back to the open web ecosystem, HeadstartWP is now available as a free and open source framework.

A light-weight, highly flexible, and extensible toolkit, HeadstartWP is everything a developer needs to start building a decoupled site using modern, broadly adopted technologies.

Out of the box, HeadstartWP solves for common feature requirements and pain points we’ve seen across our decoupled projects, reducing the effort to deliver premium-caliber implementation. Some of those key capabilities of HeadstartWP include:

• Multisite: easily connect as many different sites as needed to the Next.js codebase;
• Multilingual: built-in support for translation/localization, including native support for the Polylang translation plugin for WordPress;
• Draft previews: Preview content in WordPress on the front-end before publishing;
• Route mapping: Automatically map URL segments to WordPress routes by utilizing Next.js’ “catch-all routes” feature;
• Content Block APIs: An API for managing parsing and rendering of content (“Gutenberg”) blocks;
• Convenience hooks for fetching data from WordPress.

The framework leverages Next.js to empower engineers with Next’s rich featureset. HeadstartWP comes with the multiple rendering options offered by Next.js, such as:

• Static site generation (SSG), which renders pages at build time to improve site performance;
• Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), which rebuilds static pages as they’re updated to avoid stale content; and
• Server-side rendering (SSR).

The right rendering pattern, which can vary by project, yields significant improvements in page speed and Core Web Vitals scores.

10up is a tenured advocate and contributor to the open source ecosystem, and HeadstartWP marks a significant contribution to the WordPress and web ecosystem. Like other hallmark 10up open source projects like ClassifAI, Distributor, or ElasticPress, 10up’s active ongoing use of HeadstartWP for clients means that businesses and developers can count on us to continuously maintain, support, and update the Framework.

To learn more about 10up’s HeadstartWP and get started, check out the new microsite. If you’re interested in 10up’s help adopting HeadstartWP or creating a performant and secure site for your organization, get in touch.