In the ever-growing competitive environment of the internet, you have to fight to stay relevant. You may work overtime to make sure your branding is on point and the message is clear. On top of that, you may be navigating resource constraints and trying to break through to the stakeholders that ultimately approve your site redesign. And about that redesign — even the technology it’s built with impacts your relevancy. That’s why we need to dig into the medium behind the message; the tech that makes your state-of-the-art website possible.
When first approaching the challenge of how to build and maintain a new website, you might wonder what technologies to use. A large percentage of the time, Jamstack is the answer. Why? Well, because Jamstack enables companies of any size to achieve highly secure, performant, and easily maintainable websites. Choosing Jamstack as your tech stack gives you a number of great frameworks to choose from. One such framework is NEXT.js, which is paving the way for enterprise scalability on the Jamtack.
Let’s explore why.
One of the biggest drawbacks of most modern web pages is that they are built using a number of tools that represent a dependency outside of your control or an additional dependency in your internal systems. This can be through third-party libraries or integrations that offer your website a new type of interaction, the server that the website is hosted on, or the database that your website is writing to and pulling from.
Although Jamstack can’t eliminate all vulnerabilities, it can reduce your attack surface significantly by taking those dependencies, eliminating some, and compiling others into static assets at build time. They then get served up over a content delivery network (CDN) for a user to interact with as they normally would. This ultimately lessens the burden on the security team and lightens the load of labor hours needed to maintain your website.
It’s crucial to know that your trade render time (the time it takes to create and display an element to the screen) for up-front build time results in significantly faster page loading for Jamstack-based websites – especially when compared to client-side rendered websites.
You might ask, “What’s the build time…is it slow?” Under normal circumstances, yes — but not with NEXT.js.
In its most recent major release, NEXT.js introduced a functionality called Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR). ISR makes it so only the content that has been updated on your website will need to be rebuilt, which tremendously reduces the build time for large websites. This enables you to utilize Jamstack to its full potential, maximizing the performance of your website while minimizing the downside of a statically-generated website.
(Disclaimer — this isn’t to say that other Jamstack frameworks don’t or won’t offer this same functionality. We just happen to like NEXT.js.)
By now we have all heard of SEO and how it’s vital to a successful presence online. We’ve also all heard about how single page applications have a considerable impact on your SEO performance. This is largely due to the way Googlebot works.
Jamstack websites solve those issues introduced by traditional Single Page Applications natively because they are statically rendered, a benefit that plays heavily into providing Googlebot with rich content and lightning-fast indexing opportunities.
Gone are the days of needing a developer to make content changes on the company website, and Jamstack does nothing to re-introduce that mentality. Jamstack follows the trend of using a headless CMS for content administration which allows your copywriters to just write good copy and not worry about how it’s going to get onto the page.
So, all in all: Jamstack is awesome and NEXT.js makes it even awesome-er. It eliminates overhead and reduces complexity, resulting in a website that’s easier than ever to maintain and that’s more economical than the other equivalent choices available.
What are you waiting for? See how our agency utilizes Jamstack and contact us today.
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