AstroPress
Performance-first WordPress headless starter for Astro 5 — zero client-side JavaScript by default.
The Challenge
Coupling WordPress's own PHP rendering to the frontend means every visitor request re-runs Gutenberg templating and database queries, and even a headless setup usually still ships a client-side framework bundle for what is, in practice, static editorial content — leaving performance on the table for a use case that has none of the interactivity to justify it.
Engineering Delivery
AstroPress decouples WordPress as a pure editorial backend (Gutenberg, taxonomies, media library) from an Astro 5 layer that queries the WordPress REST API entirely at build time and compiles static HTML/CSS for the edge, shipping 0 KB of client JavaScript by default. A normalization layer isolates WordPress REST payloads from the rest of the codebase, a 4-tier SEO cascade (Yoast SEO, Rank Math, native WP fields, then site defaults) feeds Schema.org JSON-LD graphs, and an astro:assets image pipeline compiles remote WordPress media into responsive WebP/AVIF with explicit dimensions to keep layout shift at zero. A companion WordPress connector plugin enables tokenized real-time draft preview through an on-demand SSR route without a full rebuild, and a 7-category 'Headless Doctor' diagnostic (CLI and /doctor dashboard) checks environment, connectivity, REST endpoints, permalinks, the connector plugin, SEO, and draft preview end-to-end. Ships as a full Docker Compose stack pre-seeded with WordPress, MySQL, and demo content, with performance budgets enforced in CI.