Consume WordPress REST API from React

By the team UseStackPulse Updated on August 26, 2026 6 min reading

WordPress natively exposes a REST API to /wp-json/wp/v2/. Here's how to recover your items cleanly from a React application, without additional plugin.

Retrieve Items with Fetch

import { useEffect, useState } from 'react';

function ArticlesList() {
  const [posts, setPosts] = useState([]);

  useEffect(() => {
    fetch('https://monsite.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?_embed')
      .then((res) => res.json())
      .then((data) => setPosts(data));
  }, []);

  return (
    
      {posts.map((post) => (
        {post.title.rendered}
      ))}
    
  );
}

Activate Cors on the WordPress side

add_action('rest_api_init', function () {
    header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://monapp-react.com');
    header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET');
});

Tip: Use _embed in the URL to retrieve the highlighted image and the author in a single query, instead of multiplying API calls.

frequently asked questions

Do you need a plugin to activate the REST API?

No, it is enabled by default since WordPress 4.7 without additional installation.

How to post content and not just read it?

You must then authenticate via Application Passwords or JWT and send authenticated POST requests.