Building a safer and faster web with Jamstack

How difficult is modern web development today?

Agence Groom assists companies in their project to digitise and optimise their digital showcase to boost their business. And when it comes to website design (shop window or e-commerce), it is becoming increasingly difficult for developers to meet the ever-changing needs of users and to create a website that meets many requirements, while remaining user-friendly. Add to this a well-established fact that web development standards sometimes evolve faster than they can be implemented, and it becomes difficult to stay ahead of the curve.

The world of modern web development is becoming increasingly complex

In this area, a tool like WordPress has become the most popular and widely used content management system in the world. Whether it is in the design and creation of showcase sites or e-commerce sites. At Agence Groom we work a lot with this CMS on which we develop and do maintenance. It is often a solution that our clients are familiar with and which reassures them. However, we are convinced that in web development it is also important to know the latest best techniques and approaches in order to offer a better solution than a WordPress site whenever possible.

Thus, Jamstack is therefore more reliable, secure and faster, and is also a cost-saving solution that has been the final choice of business decision for our customers every time we have offered it.

The promise of the Jamstack

Jamstack is not really new. Since its official introduction by Mathias Biilmann at a presentation at SmashingConf in San Francisco in 2016, Jamstack has been adopted by millions of developers and has now become a thriving ecosystem of tools to help them build high-performance websites, progressive web applications and other projects with multiple benefits. Adopting a philosophy that respects the 5 AWS (Amazon Web Services) pillars of a solid technology solution, Jamstack is the first of its kind in the world:

Operational excellence,
Security,
Reliability,
Performance efficiency,
Cost optimization,

Major brand names such as Unilever, Nike, Google or Victoria Beckham Beauty have embarked on this journey. And the results from numerous case studies confirm less overhead, better performance and a significantly improved user experience.

What is Jamstack?

JAMstack is an abbreviation that stands for "JavaScript, Api and Markup". It refers to a web development architecture that allows developers to leverage the advantages of a static website and allows for:

faster response times
fewer security holes
cheaper corrective maintenance and easier evolutionary maintenance
a better developer experience

The Jamstack architecture allows developers to focus on creating the experience without having to worry about tools (frameworks, libraries...) and infrastructure

And the reason for this is the fundamental principles of the Jamstack architecture:

The user interface is compiled : all HTMLpages are built in advance for the users. Unlike traditional web development, they are not generated on a server with each page call. And because these pages are pre-built, they can load very quickly in browsers.
The front-end is decoupled : it is a guarantee of simplicity for the developer who can now call on back-end services without having to coordinate DevOps and back-end teams or provision servers and APIs.
Content is served from a CDN : this is a technology that is used to replicate a website's information across multiple servers around the world, so that information can be accessed quickly by web users, regardless of their location. This helps to improve the user experience on the website. The website performs better because it is faster and Google will take this into account in the search results to improve its ranking.
Deployments are atomic : the code is updated in the background of the site, which runs continuously. This ensures that there is no site downtime during the entire process (no intermediate states or maintenance windows).

The Jamstack, an eco-friendly solution

At Agence Groom we are working to reduce the environmental impact of website and web application creation by using digital tools and technologies as a lever for the ecological transition. To this end, Jamstack helps us to design eco-responsible websites.

The Jamstack architecture focuses on content delivery via a CDN, which is much more energy efficient than delivering content directly from a server

Via a CDN, a site will often be fast because of its proximity to the visitor. This proximity of the content to the end user means that there are fewer round trips to the server to retrieve the content and less energy wasted in navigating a request to the origin server.

In comparison, delivering dynamic content, such as WordPress, requires additional processing time to render each page before delivering the content. Static resources hosted on a CDN can be served to the end user easily and as needed, without having to oversize servers to handle the load.

In addition, many of the infrastructure providers that JAMstack sites rely on (e.g. Google, AWS, Microsoft) have committed to significantly reducing carbon emissions through carbon offsetting programmes and switching to renewable energy.

These commitments, along with Jamstack's low carbon footprint, place them in an environmentally friendly demand.

What is Jamstack for?

At Agence Groom, Jamstack is a big step forward in the creation of websites and web applications. As we have seen, it offers a wide range of advantages, but depending on the case, it is not necessarily the best choice. As always, it will depend on the project and the needs and issues of our clients:

how many editors and what is their digital maturity?
Is the development team that will maintain the technical solution trained?
How often is the content updated?
is it a multilingual site?
...

So if you don't care about performance, if you are a WordPress aficionado (or a no-code platform like Webflow) and it is not cost-effective for you to invest time and money in adopting a new technology as well as in training your team, we will not advise you to opt for Jamstack.

If your project depends on a large number of users and/or real-time data, Jamstack may not be the right solution.

But if you are looking to increase the performance of your site, make it faster, more secure, more reliable and environmentally responsible with better SEO capabilities, then Jamstack is definitely the way to go.

Take a look at our Jamstack projects and see for yourself the results of our customers who have made this technical choice.