Leap Kids Dental

Status: Active

Categories: WordPress, Headless CMS, Gatsby JS, API Integration

While working with Perch, I built a site for Leap Kids Dental (owned by Rock Dental Brands). The team was used to WordPress, so we built a WordPress back end in order to manage the site. However, they had some unique needs.

API Connection

Using a third-party application, they were already collecting large amounts of data: phone numbers, pictures, reviews, hours, etc. They didn’t want to have to update it in multiple places, and wanted to keep a single source of truth for this data. However, reaching out to this API on each page load would quickly overdo the queries that were allowed, and slow down the site. Which brings us to the second important need…

A Need For Speed

The team was very concerned with page speed and how it affects search engine ranking. SEO was very important to them. With this in mind, we ended up going a new route for this site.

”Headless” WordPress

We utilized a new-at-the-time method: a headles CMS. This allows the team to edit the site data in WordPress, but something interesting happens behind the scenes. Each time new content was added, or the team triggered a deployment; the site would completely build into a static-file website. This means pure HTML, CSS, and JS was delivered to users; no PHP to run on a server. During this build process, all of the data from the third party was queried once, and inserted where it was needed. Each page load didn’t have to query anything; the data already exists in the static HTML.

Outcome

We ended up with a fast site, with all of the data that was required, while allowing the client to edit the website in WordPress like they were used to.