At WordCamp US 2018 I had the chance to sit down with Jason Bahl and Ryan Kanner, both engineers at Digital First Media in Denver, Colorado, and contributors to the WPGraphQL project. WPGraphQL is an open source plugin that provides an extendable GraphQL schema and API for any WordPress site.

Bahl, who created and maintains the project, also gave a lightning talk at WCUS on using GraphQL with Gutenberg to improve the performance of custom blocks, as well as the developer experience of building them.

In our interview, Bahl and Kanner offer a general overview of the differences between GraphQL and REST. They explained how Digital First Media improved performance for the company’s publications by switching from REST to GraphQL. We also discussed how Gutenberg is a great use case for GraphQL and whether the project is something that could someday be included in WordPress core.