As small business owner, it pays to be curious about new web technologies. It\u2019s important to keep up with the latest trends in the industry. In recent years a bewildering variety of front-end web design frameworks have gained popularity. WordPress remains the most popular content management system (CMS) for small businesses. New technologies like the Jamstack seem to promise more. If you\u2019ve heard the buzz about the Jamstack, you may be wondering what it is and how it works. Read on to find out!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Set up a custom framework to suit your needs on one of our Dedicated Hosting<\/a> plans!<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u2018Jam\u2019 in Jamstack stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. Let\u2019s take these terms one at a time. JavaScript<\/a> has been the go-to language for front end web design for over 25 years. Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, are pieces of software that make it easy for different software, hardware, or programming languages to communicate with each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Markup can refer to anything from HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to writing tools like Markdown. In the Jamstack, Markup is a creative way of referring to Static Site<\/a> Generators. SSGs like Jekyll<\/a> and Hugo use Markup to help generate HTML pages to display.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather that generating site content every time someone visits a page, static sites serve up plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with no direct call to the \u2018back end\u2019. This is much faster than generating the site each time you access it. Visitors don\u2019t wait for a site\u2019s backend to create a page\u2014 a server just sends the visitor an HTML file containing the complete page immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Listing the pieces of a Jamstack site does not emphasize what makes it special. The Jamstack\u2019s innovation is making the most of modern cloud server<\/a> technology. On the Jamstack, there is no need for a traditional \u2018back end\u2019 of a website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Imagine an e-commerce site. A \u2018standard\u2019 e-commerce site requires a variety of functions: inventory management, user management, purchases, image hosting, article posting, social media management, etc. Normally, you build a website to do all of these tasks in once place. With WordPress sites, the easiest way to add new capabilities is to install plugins<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Jamstack website takes a different approach. The site designer focuses on designing the website\u2019s front end appearance and presentation with modern tools like React<\/a>. Whenever the designer needs advanced functionality, some front-end JavaScript code uses an API to \u2018call\u2019 another service. That other service can be anything\u2014 a Facebook dashboard display, a YouTube media window, a payment processing platform like PayPal, even a \u2018traditional\u2019 website like a WordPress site!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I can hear you now: \u201cOh, great\u2014 we just designed a second, more expensive website to access our old website.\u201d It sounds like a joke, but some people actually start off by doing just that! Before you write off the Jamstack as overly complicated, take a look at what makes these sites special. For the right business, the time and effort required to set up a Jamstack site can result in time\u2014 and money\u2014 saved later on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the Jamstack, your front end designers are fully in control. Web designers can use the latest advanced tools like React and Vue.js to design intricate, beautiful, and modern user experiences. Best of all, your designers can focus on making your site truly mobile first\u2014 something that can be a difficult compromise on WordPress under even the best of circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The setup of the Jamstack means that page load times are incredibly fast. After all, your \u2018pages\u2019 are just simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript served as-is! Any complicated, generated information like user profiles or a shopping cart is \u2018filled in\u2019 using JavaScript. You can easily design the site so that users refresh and reload data without leaving the page. This creates a more seamless experience and encourages user engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your back end developers and sysadmins are still vitally important when you run on the Jamstack. The great news is that their jobs get simpler! Since every service and server-side interaction is an individual API call, each individual task and action can be optimized in isolation. Complicated processes like inventory management and user tracking can be tested, rebuilt, and switched in isolation without needing to redo the entire site in one go. The ability to make rapid changes helps you keep your site up to date and \u2018future proof\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For advanced applications, tools like Kubernetes can help you effectively scale the most data-intensive parts of your apps without getting bogged down in the rest of your system\u2019s architecture. You may even find it cost effective to offload entire sections of your site! Want to hire a separate service to manage user memberships or let your payment processor\u2019s servers handle your transaction bandwidth? On the Jamstack, these improvements are as easy as changing a few lines of JavaScript.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of the avenues of attack used by criminals and hackers don\u2019t meaningfully exist on Jamstack sites. One good example of this is the injection attack\u2014 a method of inserting malicious code into a site\u2019s database. Injection attacks are a constant threat on generated sites. With Jamstack sites, visitors do not directly interact with the site\u2019s database; everything is mediated by APIs. The site design does not solve every possible problem, but the Jamstack does make a criminal\u2019s job much more difficult!<\/p>\n\n\n\n With all the benefits of the Jamstack, you\u2019re probably wondering why everyone online has not already switched. Here are a few good reasons to stick with more widely used tools like WordPress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019re a talented front end web designer with an understanding of systems architecture, the Jamstack is a natural choice. If you\u2019re a small business owner who just wants to use the Jamstack to build a website, you have two options:<\/p>\n\n\n\n This may change in the future as the Jamstack becomes more popular. In the meantime, the world has thousands of talented, reliable, and affordable WordPress developers working with more straightforward software to solve practical problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nearly every Jamstack website is a custom configuration that takes talented developers a significant amount of time to craft. Conversely, even a novice user can install a WordPress site<\/a> in less than ten minutes. Even larger businesses may not benefit enough from the Jamstack to justify the significant time, effort, and risk involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The optimization improvements that the Jamstack offers are most beneficial on sites with literally millions of visitors. Twitter<\/a> benefits from single page application architecture like the Jamstack because Twitter manages millions of simultaneous page views. If you rarely see more than a few dozen simultaneous visitors to your site, you\u2019ll likely benefit from more practical optimization solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even novice WordPress users can, with a little help, make a blog post or add content to a page. Thanks to WordPress\u2019s WYSIWYG editing<\/a>, even non-technical employees can be productive in a short amount of time. Experimental site architecture loses out on most of this ease of use. Even someone that combines WordPress with the Jamstack, a configuration known as a \u2018headless WordPress site\u2019, is going to lose out on easy editing, previewing, and many plugins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Jamstack may not be right for you now. Don\u2019t make the leap until you\u2019ve done the appropriate research and understand the tradeoffs of time and cost involved. That said, it\u2019s still worth staying informed and keeping an eye on the technology! Consider setting up a Headless WordPress site with the Jamstack to get a feel for the latest trends in web architecture. That way, if you ever do need to scale up fast, you\u2019ll be ready for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Jamstack in Simple Terms<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Structural Differences<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What Makes the Jamstack Amazing?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Front End Freedom<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Site Speed Increases<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Tasks are Isolated, Change is Quicker<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Security and Attack Surface<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s the Catch?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Expert Friendly, Not Worker Friendly<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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More Moving Parts<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Greatest Benefits are at Scale<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Lose Out on Ease of Use<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Looking Ahead and Finding a Balance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n