WordPress is a powerful content management system, but certainly isn’t the ideal solution for complex business functions and secure data management. These functions are often left to dedicated CRM and ERP solutions that are external to the website.

There’s good reason for organisations wanting to use WordPress for their primary website. It means they are able to manage their own public facing content easily, and with 40% of all websites on the internet using WordPress, it’s a good choice when choosing a platform to standardise on. However there is often an element of their line-of-business web applications that is user facing (such as a customer portal) and ideally it makes sense for these to be presented seamlessly via the website. Integrating between WordPress and other platforms has traditionally relied on methods such as iframes, APIs and custom developed plugins.

Inherently, most of these integration methods come with their fair share of security and/or usability issues and considerations. They can also be a pain to maintain.

In the pursuit of a secure, flexible, and maintainable solution, we explored a novel approach—leveraging Single Page Applications (SPA) built with frameworks like React and Vue.js. This approach provides a seamless user experience because the content is rendered seamlessly in WordPress as HTML, and as it is environment agnostic it works equally well in the Block Editor, a Page Builder or a traditional WordPress template.

Get ready for real-life examples and a practical demonstration of how this can be achieved, and more importantly some of the challenges you might encounter (and how to overcome them). From managing how to best style these for consistency with your existing style sheets, to learnings about how it can impact SEO and user experience – not to mention how we solved some of the challenges of dynamically adjusting navigation (and other items) when users authenticate or log out.

Whether you are a seasoned developer or new to WordPress integrations, this talk will equip you with practical knowledge and inspire you to push the boundaries of what can be achieved with external web applications (custom or not) and WordPress.