Next JS & WordPress: Build rapid NextJS sites with Next & WP

SEPTEMBER 2023 UPDATE: This course uses the Next JS pages directory but a brand new section has been added to cover using Next JS 13.4 and the app directory, specifically converting the pages directory over to the app directory.

Do you want to improve your React JS skills and increase your value as a front-end developer?

Level-up your React skillset by learning Next.js with a Headless WordPress backend! The site we’ll be building in Next JS uses React JS and GraphQL to generate and build static pages from a given dataset. This course will look at setting up WordPress as a headless CMS while using NextJS to generate a blazing-fast server-rendered React website from WordPress data, such as custom post types, pages, menus, media, advanced custom fields, (and more!) using GraphQL to query that data.

That’s right, we can actually query WordPress data using GraphQL!

We’ll be creating an estate agent property website in this course, looking at initial setup and development of Next JS and WordPress locally, mapping Gutenberg blocks to React components, creating our own custom Gutenberg blocks, styling these components with Tailwind CSS and querying WordPress and Gutenberg data with GraphQL to automatically generate our static pages.

We’ll look at how we can query WordPress data with GraphQL using the GraphiQL browser tool. We’ll get our hands into a little bit of WordPress code as well, but not too much – the main focus here is Next JS. Once we’re familiar and comfortable developing with NextJS and WordPress, we’ll progress onto setting up and deploying a live website using Vercel that re-builds our static web pages every time we update content in our WordPress backend, using webhooks.

It’s recommended you have rudimentary knowledge of React. We’ll be covering everything else from Next.js, WordPress, GraphQL, and Tailwind CSS!

Speed past the competition!

Next.js builds the fastest possible website. Instead of waiting to generate pages when requested, we’ll be using the static generation function within Next JS to pre-build pages and lift them into a global cloud of servers (we’ll be using Vercel for this) – ready to be delivered instantly to your users wherever they are.

• No waiting for API responses

• No waiting to render components based on requested data

• No loading spinners!

• No waiting for a server to compile a page to serve to the browser – these pages are already pre-compiled and ready to serve instantly to your users!