pnhuk.org

pnhuk.org is administrated by PNH-Support, a charity dedicated to providing a support network for people with Paroxysmal Nocturnal Haemoglobinuria (PNH) and their families.

After being asked to help and fix a few minor issues, it became increasingly apparent that many of the problems with the site were related to the theme and various plugin configurations.

The theme was pre-Gutenberg, closely coupled with specific plugins, and had an integrated page builder that provided all kinds of customisations. Sounds ace! However, this made maintenance and fixing issues more challenging. Also, Lighthouse scores returned pretty poor results when run from my machine, suggesting there could be reasonable improvement with minimal work.

It seemed a sensible idea to create a new theme from scratch and try and replicate the core functionality, rather than persevere with the theme. Fortunately, my good friend David W provided a simple design loosely following the original as inspiration. We started putting the thing together on VSCode Live Share during 2020.

There are still some significant problems that need to be ironed out, lazy-loading images and minimising third-party assets. But from the outset, lighthouse scores have improved. The “administrator”/”backend” is less busy, and the whole thing should be much simpler to maintain for everyone involved.

Due to the use of particular plugins, which were a pre-requisite, GatsbyJS wasn’t as quite as simple an option, so we chose to stick with a ‘standard’ WordPress site. This should make for an interesting comparison between default WordPress theme/plugin frontends and Headless with GatsbyJS/NextJS.