Newbie, just finished reading the Wordpress tutorial by Jason Lengstorf

So I’m new to Jamstack and Netlify and Gatsby, but I have been building Wordpress sites for over 10 years. I just read the tutorial here and have one main question: does this mean I now need to host two sites if moving my Wordpress site to Jamstack/Gatsby/Netlify? The tutorial doesn’t cover that. I assume you would keep your existing wordpress host and change the URL to something like admin.myexampleblog.com, and block traffic to anything but the Wordpress admin pages? And then you’d now be also paying for a Netlify plan to host your static files which would be served from www.myexampleblog.com? So in essence you are paying for this speed increase for your blog?

I just want to make sure I’m understanding the concept and how this would work. Or can this in some way tie into my current wordpress hosting plan since I will need to be keeping it for the admin anyway?

Thanks for the feedback.

@skillmatic You are sort of correct, although Netlify has a fantastic Starter tier.

You have to keep your WordPress host because that will be the source for your JAMStack files. Obviously, any WordPress site that is no longer being updated could be converted to a static site, with the static site files being uploaded to Netlify and then the WordPress instance killed. This is probably a rare situation, though.

The whole point of this approach is to maintain all of your WordPress back-end goodness, and just use APIs to gain access to the content as the source for building static files for visitors.

Also, in addition to improvements in page-load speeds, you also gain global CDN, DDoS protection, security, and the other benefits of static sites. Unfortunately, it currently requires a fair amount of work to duplicate the look and feel of a WordPress site in JAMStack format.

That is for the reply @gregraven. I guess I could see this being beneficial if I could host this all on my current hosting. I get all of that CDN/DDoS/Security stuff with Cloudflare.

I’m going to keep an eye on how Wordpress on Jamstack evolves, but for now I don’t think it’s at a point where it makes sense for my clients. It definitely piqued my interest though, and will definitely throw up a Hello World to get a better grasp on how this all works.

@skillmatic That’s what I’m doing.

Regarding Netlify static vs. Cloudflare, with Netlify those features are baked in, whereas with Cloudflare it’s added on after the fact. Some of the new DDoS attacks still manage to slip right by Cloudflare, but they’ll still bring down your WordPress site in short order, even if you’re using managed hosting such as WP Engine with Sucuri and other protections. Don’t ask me how I know.