Esports Publishing at Dexertos with Rob Humar

Headless WP Podcast

In this podcast episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Rob Humar, the head of web development at Dexertos, the world's largest esports publishing platform. As a media company, Dexertos does around 60 million monthly page views. Rob walks us through some of the details of the Dexertos tech stack, which includes Next.js and headless WordPress using WPGraphQL.
Rob discusses how the primary driver of their switch to headless was new feature velocity and futureproofing their frontend stack. By sticking with WordPress as the CMS for their 80K posts, they were able to gain some of the benefits of a full rewrite without migrating CMSs. As we dig into the details, we talk about how Dexertos uses Next.js ISR WPGraphQL Smart Cache to handle some of the demands of breaking real-time news.
As an international publisher, Dexertos also has sites in French and Spanish, and Rob describes how they manage all of this using WordPress multisite for the CMS and using one Next.js codebase across all three different sites.
Rob walks us through what the experience for the content editor looks like on the Dexertos site, which limits some of the choices in the block editor and uses ACF to structure data for custom post types.
As of December 2022, Dexertos won esports coverage platform of the year, which is a testament to the work Rob and his team are doing on their platform.