PWD

WordPress runs a large share of the web, and for good reason. But it builds each page on the server at the moment a visitor asks for it, and over the years a site can pick up plugins and overhead that drag on speed. For an agency whose own website is part of the pitch, that performance ceiling was worth addressing.

We rebuilt PWD's site on Gatsby, a framework based on React. Instead of assembling pages on every visit, Gatsby prepares them ahead of time and serves them as ready-made files. The result is a site that loads fast and holds up well, which helps both the visitor's experience and how the site performs in search.

Because this was a build for another agency, the goal was to deliver work they would be comfortable putting their own name to.

Moving to Gatsby meant rethinking how PWD would manage their content, so we paired the build with a headless CMS. Headless means the system that stores and edits content is kept separate from the layer that displays it. Editors work in one place, and the content is delivered to the Gatsby front end through an API.

For a busy agency, that separation is practical. The people updating pages get a clean editing experience without touching the code, and the developers keep full control over how everything is built and presented. It also keeps the door open for reusing that same content elsewhere later.

The combination of Gatsby and a headless CMS gave PWD what they came for: a faster site and a cleaner way to look after it than the WordPress setup it replaced.