Soames is a way to build WordPress sites that don’t feel like WordPress on the front end. Your team keeps the editor they already know, and your visitors get a fast, secure, static website. This is a quick introduction: what Soames is, why we built it, and who it’s for.
Why we built Soames
WordPress is a wonderful place to write and manage content. But a traditional WordPress front end carries a lot of weight: themes, plugins, and a database query on every single page load. We wanted the authoring experience without the baggage.
So Soames takes a headless approach. WordPress becomes a content API, and a modern Astro front end reads that content and renders plain, static HTML. The result is a site that’s faster for visitors, cheaper to host, and far more secure. There’s no live server rendering pages on demand, and nothing to attack at runtime.
Keep WordPress for what it’s great at (writing), and hand the front end to something built for speed.
How it works
There are three moving pieces, and only one of them is something you touch day to day:
- You write in WordPress, exactly as you do now.
- WPGraphQL exposes that content over a clean API.
- The Soames Astro theme reads the API and builds a static site you can deploy anywhere.
Because the output is just files, it can live on any static host and load almost instantly.
Who Soames is for
- Site owners and editors who love the WordPress editor but want a faster, safer front end.
- Agencies building client sites that need to be inexpensive to host and easy to hand off.
- Developers who want a modern, component-based front end (Astro + React) sourced from WordPress.
If you’ve outgrown a traditional WordPress theme but aren’t ready to give up WordPress itself, Soames is built for you.
Get started
We’re just getting going. Head over to the documentation to set up your own Soames site, and check back as the project grows. There’s much more to come.