You work internally for some business whether big or small. Maybe you’re solo or lucky enough to have a team. Or perhaps you’re working within a multinational enterprise corporation where there are endless lists of requirements and layers of bureaucracy. You’re building a new website and every single department must be happy with the technology before the project will even begin—the devs, the marketers, the editors, even the executives when they, without a doubt, ask to swap out the logo a day before launch.

You work in a digital agency or software company. Maybe you work on a product, or have clients and you work on their projects. You may be tasked with replacing some outdated, insecure website with a more modern stack. You know your client does not have the budget for something like that, but you know in your heart that working in their legacy codebase will take longer than replacing it entirely. It’s just a website, after all.

You’re an independent developer or engineer. Maybe you work freelance on your own side projects or maybe you take on paying client work. Or, maybe you’re hired on a contractual basis by one of the other two categories. You are there to consult, lead their team, and on top of that, likely to write most of the code. They trust you, but deep down you have doubts about the reality of meeting all of the requirements.

In any case, you are likely building one of the following things:

A fancy microsite with a super polished front-end but relatively simple backend. You might be pushing a new campaign, marketing a new product line, or maybe you are just showing off your skills on the web trying to land the next big tech job.

An absolutely massive, enterprise-grade website. It has APIs that are going to be dominated and its CMS will need to bend to meet all of the business needs. Every day you will be asked to move mountains and are expected to do so. There is a lot at stake and you want to sleep soundly at night.

A content publishing platform, whether it's a personal blog or a multilingual news outlet. Your documents might be intensely complex, with relationships back and forth, taxonomies, nesting, or maybe they’re grouped together within a sub-site. The posts are categorized, related content is automatically populated, and everything is localized.

One driving principle with Payload is that it is code-first by design. But this does not have to come at the expense of those on your team who are not engineers. You can build your biggest, baddest stack, then turn around and spoil them the best admin editing experience of their lives.

Even the most complex site structures and menu systems are completely manageable.

The next time you’re tasked with building a website, blog, or portfolio of any size, you may be tempted to reach for popular drag-and-drop WYSIWYG solutions like Webflow, SquareSpace, or Wix. Honestly it’s hard to even type those words because you are not a simple click-ops engineer. While those platforms have a place in this world, they are certainly off the table for you.

Besides, your project is much bigger than that, so you’re leaning toward (or instructed to use) trusty old WordPress.

If you work in an agency or have ever worked with clients, then this probably cuts deep, and we empathize dearly with you.

So for all of these reasons and more we are introducing the official Website Template—a starter that puts together all the best practices to the best of our ability.

This template is built in the same way we’d build a site for ourselves, making all the right decisions so you don’t have to. Have strong branding or your own UI library? Build on top of what’s already there instead of chipping away at some opinionated setup.

This template is right for you if you are building:

A personal website that pushes the boundaries of the front-end, a portfolio that lands you your next job, or a blog that only you and your grandma will read
A globally distributed, multilingual website that receives extremely heavy traffic and has very specific demands that require quick turnaround with high stakes for everyone involved (no pressure)
A content publishing platform with complex, nested relationships, whose pages are grouped into sub-sites, related by taxonomy, and localized
An agency or business website used to funnel users into customer leads, where there is real monetary value in this work and your metrics are being recorded

Everything you need is ready to go, including:

Admin Dashboard
Pages, Posts, Projects
Layout Builder
Draft Preview
Forms
SSG, ISR, ODR
Dark Mode
Redirects
Sitemap
SEO
And much more.

Quick Start

Option 1 (Recommended)

Head to Payload Cloud, clone the Website Template and deploy it on a free trial. This process may take a few minutes, and once it's done you'll have a fully working website, complete with a live domain. This will have created a new repo for you in your GitHub account. You can clone this repo down for local development, and when you push, your commits will automatically deploy.

Option 2

The code for this template is completely open source and can be found here.

To quickly clone this template, run the following command in your terminal: `npx create-payload-app my-project -t website`

Then follow the instructions in the `README` to get started. You can always deploy this repo to Payload Cloud later.

<div style= "text-align: center">hello world</div>