Next.js + WordPress

It's headless WordPress! 💀 - https://nextjswp.com

This is a minimal, production-ready starter for building headless WordPress sites with Next.js. It fetches content from WordPress via WPGraphQL and styles with TailwindCSS.

This project now includes fully typed GraphQL operations, tons of unit tests, and is Agentic AI ready. Use it as a foundation for your next lightning-fast, fully decoupled WordPress project.

Tech Stack:

• Next.js 16 (App Router, React Compiler, Turbopack)
• React 19 (Server Components)
• TypeScript 5
• Tailwind CSS 4
• WordPress (headless via WPGraphQL)

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WordPress Features

• Category and Tag Archives
• Comments
• Custom Fields
• Custom Post Types
• On-demand Revalidation
• Post/Page Previews
• RSS Feed
• Robots.txt
• Search
• Sitemap.xml
• Static Site Generation (SSG)
• WordPress Menus
• Yoast SEO

Plus it's really, really fast! 🚀

Development Features

• Fully typed GraphQL queries via GraphQL Code Generator (@graphql-codegen/cli)
• Agentic AI ready with a comprehensive AGENTS.md file
• plan-agent, dev-agent, code-review-agent & test-agent for GitHub Copilot
• TypeScript, ESLint, Stylelint & Prettier
• SonarQube support
• TDD workflow with Vitest, React Testing Library & MSW

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Setup

1. Clone the repo

git clone git@github.com:gregrickaby/nextjs-wordpress.git

2. Install dependencies

nvm use && npm i

3. Create a .env file

cp .env.example .env

Customize the URLs in .env to match your WordPress setup:

# WordPress GraphQL API URL. No trailing slash.
NEXT_PUBLIC_WORDPRESS_GRAPHQL_URL="https://blog.nextjswp.com/graphql"

# WordPress REST API URL. No trailing slash.
NEXT_PUBLIC_WORDPRESS_REST_API_URL="https://blog.nextjswp.com/wp-json/wp/v2"

# Optional. JWT auth refresh token.
#NEXTJS_AUTH_REFRESH_TOKEN=""

# Preview Secret. Must match the constant in wp-config.php.
NEXTJS_PREVIEW_SECRET="preview"

# Revalidation Secret. Must match the constant in wp-config.php.
NEXTJS_REVALIDATION_SECRET="revalidate"

Note: Only use NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0 in local development with self-signed certificates for older versions of Node. Never use this in production!

4. Configure next.config.ts

Update the URL in next.config.ts to match your WordPress site:

import type {NextConfig} from 'next'

const nextConfig: NextConfig = {
  images: {
    formats: ['image/avif', 'image/webp'],
    remotePatterns: [
      {
        protocol: 'https',
        hostname: '*.nextjswp.**' // <-- Change this to your WordPress site
      },
      {
        protocol: 'https',
        hostname: '*.gravatar.**' // For comment avatars
      }
    ]
  }
}

export default nextConfig

5. Configure /lib/config.ts

Open /lib/config.ts and update the content to match your WordPress site:

const config = {
  siteName: 'Next.js WordPress',
  siteDescription: "It's headless WordPress!",
  siteUrl: 'https://nextjswp.com',
  revalidation: 3600
}

6. Configure WordPress

Plugins

You'll need either a local or public WordPress site with the following plugins:

• Advanced Custom Fields (free version is fine)
• Next.js WordPress Plugin
• Next.js WordPress Theme
• WPGraphQL Yoast SEO
• WPGraphQL for Advanced Custom Fields
• WPGraphQL JWT Authentication (optional)
• WPGraphQL
• Yoast SEO

WP-Config

After installing all the plugins mentioned above, you'll need to add some constants to your wp-config.php file:

// The URL of your Next.js frontend. Include the trailing slash.
define( 'NEXTJS_FRONTEND_URL', 'https://nextjswp.com/' );

// Optional. JWT auth refresh token.
//define( 'GRAPHQL_JWT_AUTH_SECRET_KEY', '' );

// Any random string. This must match the .env variable in the Next.js frontend.
define( 'NEXTJS_PREVIEW_SECRET', 'preview' );

// Any random string. This must match the .env variable in the Next.js frontend.
define( 'NEXTJS_REVALIDATION_SECRET', 'revalidate' );

Permalinks

Finally, set your permalink structure to /blog/%postname%/ in Settings -> Permalinks.

Next.js 16 Migration

This project uses Next.js 16 which requires params and searchParams to be awaited. All dynamic routes use the async pattern:

export default async function Page({
  params
}: {
  params: Promise<{slug: string}>
}) {
  const {slug} = await params
  // ...
}

See the Next.js 16 upgrade guide for more details.

7. Optional. Authentication for Previews

In order to query draft posts for Previews, you'll need to authenticate with WordPress. The following is a one-time step:

• Install and activate the WPGraphQL JWT Authentication plugin
• Generate any random string. I recommend using the WordPress salt generator
• Copy the string
• Open your wp-config.php file, and paste the string into the GRAPHQL_JWT_AUTH_SECRET_KEY constant

// Optional. JWT auth refresh token.
define( 'GRAPHQL_JWT_AUTH_SECRET_KEY', 'the-random-string-generated-by-wp-salt' );

• Go to GraphQL -> GraphiQL IDE in your WordPress admin
• Copy the following and paste into GraphiQL IDE (replace your_username and your_password with your WordPress credentials)

mutation Login {
  login(
    input: {
      clientMutationId: "uniqueId"
      password: "your_password"
      username: "your_username"
    }
  ) {
    refreshToken
  }
}

• Click the Play button in GraphiQL to run the mutation
• Copy the refreshToken returned by the mutation
• Open the Next.js .env.local file, and paste the refreshToken into the NEXTJS_AUTH_REFRESH_TOKEN variable

# Optional. JWT auth refresh token.
NEXTJS_AUTH_REFRESH_TOKEN="refresh-token-generated-by-grapqh-query"

You should now be able to preview draft posts in your Next.js app by clicking the Preview button in your WordPress admin.

8. Start the dev server

npm run dev

Once the dev server has started, you can view the front-end: http://localhost:3000

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Querying WordPress data with GraphQL

GraphQL is efficient because we can query multiple endpoints in a single request. If we were to use the WordPress REST-API, we would need to make multiple round trips to each respective endpoint.

We can build our queries in GraphiQL (or your favorite REST client) and let JSON.stringify() format it. Because this is all standard JavaScript, we can even pass variables to our queries-- no need for a 3rd party package!

Here is a query to fetch a single post (based on the slug), the featured image, author meta, categories, tags, SEO, and post comments:

import {fetchGraphQL} from '@/lib/functions'
import {Post} from '@/lib/types'

/**
 * Fetch a single post by slug.
 */
export default async function getPostBySlug(slug: string) {
  const query = `
    query GetPost($slug: ID!) {
      post(id: $slug, idType: SLUG) {
        databaseId
        date
        modified
        content(format: RENDERED)
        title(format: RENDERED)
        featuredImage {
          node {
            altText
            sourceUrl
            mediaDetails {
              height
              width
            }
          }
        }
        author {
          node {
            name
            avatar {
              url
            }
          }
        }
        tags {
          nodes {
            databaseId
            name
          }
        }
        categories {
          nodes {
            databaseId
            name
          }
        }
        seo {
          metaDesc
          title
        }
        comments(first: 30, where: {order: ASC}) {
          nodes {
            content(format: RENDERED)
            databaseId
            date
            status
            author {
              node {
                avatar {
                  url
                }
                email
                name
                url
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  `

  const variables = {
    slug: slug
  }

  // Fetch the data using a reusable fetch function.
  // Next.js automatically memoizes and caches these requests.
  const response = await fetchGraphQL(query, variables)

  // Handle errors gracefully - return null if post not found.
  if (!response?.data?.post) {
    return null
  }

  return response.data.post as Post
}

Key Patterns:

• Always check for null/undefined data before returning
• Featured images are nullable - use optional chaining: post.featuredImage?.node
• Add fallback alt text: alt={post.featuredImage.node.altText || post.title}
• Return null or [] on errors for graceful degradation

This repo does not use a 3rd party GraphQL package, because Next.js automatically memoizes the fetch() requests in our custom fetch function. This means that if we fetch the same data twice, Next.js will only make one request to WordPress.

If you prefer use a 3rd party GraphQL package, simply swap out the custom fetchGraphQL() function with the package of your choosing.

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AI Agents

This project includes specialized AI agents to help with development:

• @dev-agent - Full-stack developer for Next.js 16, TypeScript, and WordPress integration
• @test-agent - QA engineer for writing comprehensive tests
• @docs-agent - Technical writer for documentation

See AGENTS.md for detailed information about using agents.

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Testing

This project uses a comprehensive testing stack:

• Vitest - Fast unit test framework
• React Testing Library - Component testing with user-centric queries
• MSW v2 - Mock Service Worker for API mocking (no fetch mocking)
• jest-axe - Accessibility testing

Running Tests:

npm test              # Run all tests once
npm run test:watch    # Watch mode for development
npm run test:ui       # Interactive UI mode
npm run test:coverage # Generate coverage report
npm run validate      # Run all checks: format, lint, typecheck, test

Test-Driven Development:

All components and functions have co-located .test.tsx or .test.ts files. Tests use MSW v2 for GraphQL API mocking and jest-axe for accessibility validation. Target 80%+ test coverage on critical paths.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for detailed testing patterns and best practices.

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Going To Production

Remember to add all the environment variables from .env.local to your production environment on Vercel or Netlify.

Important Production Notes:

• The revalidation API includes rate limiting (10 requests/minute per IP)
• In serverless environments (Vercel, AWS Lambda), the in-memory rate limiting won't work across instances
• For production, consider using Redis (Upstash) or Vercel KV for distributed rate limiting
• See app/api/revalidate/route.ts for implementation details

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Other

RSS Feed, Sitemap, Robots.txt

• https://nextjswp.com/feed.xml
• https://nextjswp.com/sitemap.xml
• https://nextjswp.com/robots.txt

Previews

• https://nextjswp.com/preview/120?secret=preview

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Contributing

This is a hobby project and my time is limited, so your contributions are welcome! Please see:

• Contributing Guidelines - How to contribute code
• Agents Guide - How to use AI agents for development

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