A React blog engine like no other

Meet the React blog engine that integrates with your website using a straightforward API. Smooth, simple, and tasty content integration — that’s Butter.

Posted on November 20, 2023

Intuitive admin interface

So easy to use. So easy to customize. You’re going to love the blog you build with ButterCMS.

Handy integration with React

Our React blog engine has a simple content API and drop-in SDKs that make the magic happen in minutes, not hours.

A truly zero-maintenance solution

With ButterCMS, you’ll never worry about security upgrades, hosting, or performance again.

You've got better things to do than build another blog

Drop our React blog engine into your app, and get back to more interesting problems.

ButterCMS is an API-based blog engine that integrates seamlessly with new and existing React apps. It's great for SEO, and provides a clean and modern user interface that your marketing team will love. You can deploy ButterCMS in minutes using our React API client. 

That leaves plenty of time for you and your marketing team to do what you do best: create killer apps with killer content. 

Play video

See how Butter’s API enables you to launch a flexible blog with amazing SEO using your existing tech stack.

G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award

Best blog engine on the market

headshot of Hampton Catl

After shopping the market, it was clear that ButterCMS was the perfect choice. It allows our developers to build powerful components and makes it easy for our marketing team to drive a better customer experience. Hampton Catlin Creator of Sass and Haml

Deploy our React Starter in 30 seconds

Or follow the below commands to clone a copy of the repo from github, install dependencies, set your free Butter token, and run your local server on localhost:3000/.

$ git clone https://github.com/ButterCMS/react-starter-buttercms.git
$ cd react-starter-buttercms
$ npm install
$ echo 'REACT_APP_BUTTER_CMS_API_KEY=your_free_api_token_here' >> .env
$ npm run start

Built to make content marketing easy

ButterCMS is the best React blog engine for a simple reason: React developers can build solutions that marketing people love. Our API allows your content gurus to quickly spin up high-converting blog templates, sidebars, related content features, and more, all using simple drag-and-drop functionality.

  • Use main domain (improves SEO)
  • Friendly admin interface
  • Upload images, video, and other media
  • Edit URL slugs and meta tags
  • Tags and categories
  • Author profiles
  • RSS/Atom feeds
  • Search
  • Webhooks
  • And more...

The simplest React blog engine you'll find

Our simple setup saves you time and money. Take us for a spin to see for yourself!

headshot of LUKE GARDNER

It's the epitome of plug-and-play simplicity for content creators. It does exactly what I need it to. LUKE GARDNER, CONTENT SPECIALIST, PRINTAVO

Fast integration with any React app

Our mission was to make it easy to integrate Butter with your existing React app in minutes. It’s so simple! To demonstrate, here’s a mini tutorial to give you a feel for the process of adding Butter to your React app.

Of course, you can also use our Pages and Collections to do advanced content modeling. For a full integration guide, check out our Official Guide for the ButterCMS React API client.

Play video

See how easily you can integrate the ButterCMS Pages API with your React app.

Seamless React components

Empower your marketing team to create a customized blog engine that aligns perfectly with your React components. 

Components are the essential building blocks of any React app, and ButterCMS handles them with ease. 

Our drag and drop interface makes it simple to structure your content to match existing React components and to create new reusable components whenever you need them.

The best React blog engine for SEO

ButterCMS gives you absolute control over on-page SEO ranking factors. Key SEO variables are built into our default post template, giving your marketing team direct access to configure all of these settings, and more.

  • Page title
  • Post tags and categories
  • META description
  • URL slug
  • Featured image / Open Graph image
  • Image ALT tags
  • Link anchor text

ButterCMS saves you development time

Most customers get our React blog engine up and running in less than an hour. Try it yourself!

headshot of DILLON BURNS

Simple as can be, with powerful features and great customer support. DILLON BURNS, FRONT END DEVELOPER, KEYME

How to integrate ButterCMS into your React application

Integrating the Butter blog engine into your React  app is dead simple. Here's a mini tutorial to get a feel for setting up your blog home and blog post pages. 

For a full integration guide, check out our Official React Guide

To set up the blog home page to list all posts, we'll set up a React component that fetches and displays posts in src/Blog.js:

import React, { Component } from 'react'
import { Link } from 'react-router-dom'
import butter from './butter-client'

class App extends Component {
  state = {
    meta: {},
    data: []
  }
  async componentDidMount () {
    const { match } = this.props
    let page = match.params.page || 1

    const resp = await butter.post.list({ page: page, page_size: 10 })
    this.setState(resp.data)
  }
  render () {
    const { next_page, previous_page } = this.state.meta

    return (
      <div>
        {this.state.data.map((post, key) => {
          return (
            <div key={key}>
              <Link to={`/blog/posts/${post.slug}`}>{post.title}</Link>
            </div>
          )
        })}

        <br />

        <div>
          {previous_page && (
            <Link to={`/blog/${previous_page}`}>
              <a>Prev</a>
            </Link>
          )}

          {next_page && (
            <Link to={`/blog/${next_page}`}>
              <a>Next</a>
            </Link>
          )}
        </div>
      </div>
    )
  }
}

export default App

With React, componentDidMount will execute once the component is loaded on to the DOM. componentDidMount also receives a context object with various properties - we access the match property for handling pagination. We are fetching posts from a ButterCMS test account - sign in with Github to set up your own posts.

In our render() method we use some clever syntax to display pagination links only when they're applicable. Our post links will take us to 404 - we'll get those working next.

Let's set up the blog post page to list a single post. We'll also update our src/BlogPost.js component to fetch blog posts via slug and render the title and body:

import React from 'react'
import butter from './butter-client'
import { Helmet } from 'react-helmet'

export default class extends React.Component {
  state = {
    data: {}
  }
  async componentDidMount () {
    const { match } = this.props
    const resp = await butter.post.retrieve(match.params.post)
    this.setState(resp.data)
  }
  render () {
    const post = this.state.data

    return (
      <div>
        <Helmet>
          <title>{post.seo_title}</title>
          <meta name='description' content={post.meta_description} />
          <meta name='og:image' content={post.featured_image} />
        </Helmet>
        <h1>{post.title}</h1>
        <div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: post.body }} />
      </div>
    )
  }
}

Finally, we'll add some routes to the index component. To get our post links working, we need to set up dynamic routing for our blog posts that routes all /posts/:slug URLs to our post component, and the / URL to our index page:

import React from 'react'
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom'
import { BrowserRouter as Router, Route } from 'react-router-dom'

import Blog from './Blog'
import BlogPost from './BlogPost'
import Customers from './Customers'
import Customer from './Customer'
import Faq from './Faq'
import Homepage from './Homepage'

const AppRouter = () => (
  <Router>
    <div>
      <Route path='/' exact component={Homepage} />
      <Route path='/blog/:page' exact component={Blog} />
      <Route path='/blog' exact component={Blog} />
      <Route path='/blog/posts/:post' component={BlogPost} />
    </div>
  </Router>
)

ReactDOM.render(<AppRouter />, document.getElementById('root'))

That's it! The blog posts created in your Butter dashboard will immediately show up in your app.

Get Started for Free

Try Butter free for 14 days

See for yourself what makes Butter the best React blog engine out there. Click the button below to sign up for your free 14-day trial.