At Universal Yums we decided to rebuild our customer dashboard in React. The dashboard is where customers go to make changes to their subscription, view their orders, update payment information, etc. Since it contains a lot of interactive elements, it felt like a good place to drop in React and avoid a lot of unnecessary page loads.

The dashboard is not entirely headless since we still use WordPress to render the initial page and handle authentication, but once you’re in React takes over and all the data is fetched using REST API calls. I made a short video showing how it works.

From a business perspective, I am not sure there is a real compelling business reason to move to React for most sites. A pretty similar result could be achieved with PHP rendered pages and a sprinkling of javascript on top. But if your team likes to work in React and doesn’t mind setting up custom endpoints to enable certain functionality, I think it is a fine route to go.