There are 40 million websites built on Wordpress. Wordpress is the #1 Content Management Tool in the world. However, almost every business owner and developer know there are certain issues with Wordpress. Namely speed, security and availability.
How does one solve that? Use the Jamstack.
What is Jamstack?
Jamstack is method (or architecture) to make the
- your web pages load faster
- your website more secure
- your application, page or site easier to scale
Jamstack uses a lot of the tools and heavily focused on developers’ experience to build and run apps and websites with the tools that they love.
Jamstack helps development of website separate from the content creation (a marketing function) and brings them together through a workflow.
Jamstack stands for Javascript, API, Markdown stack.
Why Jamstack
Why one should use Jamstack instead of WordPress or Magento to build your website? That is a good question to ask. After one should not blindly follow just about any trend.
Once you have understood “The Why” then comes “The How”.
“Every business needs a website”
Your Website is your digital presence that communicates to your customers
- What your business does
- What you business has to offer
- What is unique about your product or service
- Perhaps in the case of e-commerce for how much
JAMStack is Secure by Design
OK. Now that we have settled you need some kind of website, let us the existing choices you have to build one.
Wordpress // Magento
Typically, today small websites are built with Wordpress.
Wordpress is the holy grail when it comes to Content Management System. Wordpress helps anyone create and publish a few pages within hours. There are 1000s of templates, plugins and equally good number of developers available to help you customize your website as per your needs.
Wordpress has few stellar features that content creaters & business owners love.
- ability to create content quickly
- ability to choose the template / style
- change url / slugs as needed
- write copies that can rank and get it diagnoised using plugins like Yoast!
- start selling products, track stock, email clients
But Wordpress although easy to get started, has its downsides. Inexpensive developers also are average or below average in thier technical knowledge. They tend to download a lot of plugins to get your website the features that you want. Finally a lot of plugins also written by average developer may not have followed the best practices to create “safe” plugins.
As a result, almost every Wordpress website ends up with 10-20 different plugins, slowing down performance. Further, often the site breaks down or worse gets hacked. Without a good back up and a easy way to restore your backup (which could get hacked) you would be without a website for many days.
Let us recap this 3 main issues with Wordpress that you are likely to face.
- availability issues
- speed / performance issues
- security issues (if it gets hacked)
If your website is your main revenue generator (through ads, e-commerce), then this is absolutely horrific situation to be in. Else, it could just a bit embarrassing that your site is not up and running. Either way, the developer is left holding the baby and the responsibility to fix it. While the business owner is suffering from loss of income or loss of reputation.
Why JAMStack
When it comes to building website and safely deploying it Jamstack is stellar in providing all the 3 counts of availability, speed / performance and avoiding security issues that come with hosting something like wordpress.
Lets examine the 3 most valuable aspects of your website are achieved using Jamstack
#1 Availability
Jamstack sites are built using Static Site Generators (SSG) such as Hugo, Gatsby, Jekyll etc. These SSG take your content from an API or markdown files and convert it into pre-rendered pages which are then distributed via a content delivery network (aka CDN) across 100s of servers across the globe.
Imagine that you have digitally printed each web page and made 100s of copies and spread it around the globe, so that each time someone goes to your website, it doesnt have to be re-printed on demand. The user in India gets served a copy from India, the user in the US gets served a copy from the US. When you make a change, all the webpages are reprinted and re-distributed under 2-4 min or less.
Doing this helps your website scale by not having to get back to your server each time a page is requested. And also you dont need to keep adding / removing server as your user base grows.
#2 Security
Now because all pages are static there is no real time connection to your server or to your database. So potentially a hacker has nothing to hack.
#3 Speed / UX / UI
Since all pages are static and pre-printed so to speak, such pages load in under 1 second (depending on how much images you have added). You can even further improve your page speed by using pre-processed images & cached images.
Sp there you go. You get the 3 most important aspects of your website solved with Jamstack (or JAMStack).
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