How We Built This Website — and Why We Did It This Way
IEvery Day Digital’s own website is a good example of how we approach builds for our clients. Fast, flexible, easy to manage — and built on a foundation that won’t hold you back as your needs change.
Here’s a look at what’s under the hood, and why we made the decisions we did.
The Problem with Traditional WordPress Themes
Most WordPress sites are built the traditional way — a theme controls everything, content and presentation are tightly coupled, and making significant changes to how the site looks or behaves often means working around the constraints of a theme you didn’t write.
It works, but it has limits. Performance can suffer. Customisation gets complicated. And as a business grows, those limits start to show.
We wanted something better for our own site — and the approach we landed on is the same one we now offer clients who need more than a standard WordPress build.
A Headless Architecture
The site runs on a headless WordPress setup. WordPress handles content management in the background — the familiar editing experience, page management, and media library — but it’s completely decoupled from what visitors actually see.
The public-facing website is a React application. It requests content from WordPress using GraphQL, which means it fetches exactly what it needs, structures it cleanly, and renders pages dynamically — without the overhead of a traditional WordPress front end.
The result is a site that feels modern and performs well, while still giving us full control over content without touching code.
What This Means in Practice
For us as the agency, it means we can build the front end properly — reusable components, clean structure, full control over design and interaction — without being constrained by theme conventions.
For content management, nothing changes. Pages, posts, and media are all managed through the standard WordPress interface. No developer needed for day-to-day updates.
For performance, decoupling the front end from WordPress means the site isn’t loading theme stylesheets, plugin scripts, or anything else it doesn’t need. It loads what’s required, when it’s required.
For flexibility, the architecture scales cleanly. Adding new page types, data structures, or features doesn’t require rebuilding from scratch — it’s a matter of extending what’s already there.
The Takeaway
WordPress still has a place in modern web development — but it doesn’t have to mean a traditional theme-based site. When paired with a custom React front end and GraphQL, it becomes a genuinely powerful content platform without the usual trade-offs.
This is the kind of build that suits businesses who want control over their content, care about performance, and need a site that can grow with them.
Thinking about a new website or a rebuild? Get in touch — we’re happy to talk through what would work best for your situation.
