Frontity

Frontity provides an open-source framework designed to facilitate the creation of websites using a decoupled, or "headless," architecture with WordPress as the content management system and React for the front-end development. Founded in Madrid, Spain, in 2014 by Pablo Postigo and Luis Herranz, the company aimed to simplify the integration between these two popular technologies. Their core product, the Frontity Framework, launched in 2019, allows developers to leverage WordPress for content management while building the user-facing side of the website in React, enabling faster performance and enhanced user experiences. The framework accesses content via the WordPress REST API and then uses React to generate the final HTML displayed in the browser.

The business operated on an open-source model, making its primary framework free to use. Its target clients were developers and agencies seeking the performance benefits of a headless setup without extensive coding complexities. The journey of Postigo and Herranz was centered on their long-standing use of WordPress for entrepreneurial projects, which inspired them to address the challenges of integrating it with modern front-end technologies like React. The company's growth was supported by several funding rounds, including a significant seed round in April 2020 of over $1 million, led by Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com) and K Fund. This investment paved the way for deeper collaboration and discussions.

In August 2021, Automattic acquired Frontity for an undisclosed amount. This transaction was characterized as an "acquihire," as the primary goal was to integrate the expertise of the Frontity team into the core WordPress open-source project. Following the acquisition, the founders and their team shifted their focus from maintaining the Frontity framework to contributing to the Gutenberg full-site editing developer experience within WordPress. The Frontity framework itself was left in a stable, bug-free state and transitioned to a community-led project, remaining available for use in new and existing projects.

Keywords: headless WordPress, React framework, decoupled CMS, open-source, front-end development, WordPress REST API, JavaScript, web performance, Automattic, Gutenberg, full-site editing, developer tools, server-side rendering, web development, Pablo Postigo, Luis Herranz, website performance, content management system, site generator, modern web