Introduction
Although the business world is becoming increasingly competitive every single day, the availability of a professionally designed website can place your clients at a vantage position in their fight for growth and survival. JAMstack can make this much easier to achieve.
While JAMstack has gained some recognition in the web development community, its usability is still debated by many web developers. It, therefore, becomes imperative to clarify some of the misconceptions in the minds of some of them.
You will be surprised at the end of this article that JAMstack provides solutions to the web development issues you face. I know this might be hard for you to believe at the moment, but I have six points to prove this. These six points might be what you need to turn the page and get acquainted with this new piece of web technology.
1. Enhanced Performance
Usually, customers create an idea of the quality of a company’s product(s) or service(s) by their experience while navigating through their website. This is true even if what you operate is a blog. As a professional web developer, part of your top concerns should be the speed of your website. It is a no-brainer in today’s world filled with internet users having a short-attention-span world. Speed has become a magical tool for customer retention in online marketing. Did you know that an average human can only retain undivided attention for only eight seconds? If you want to help your clients develop a great marketing strength as a developer, you need a web development architecture that would provide some top-notch speed. The good news is, JAMstack does just that!
The fact that JAMstack is client-side says a lot about how fast websites built with it would respond. The combined use of HTML and CDN (Content Delivery Network) in JAMstack web development makes it quite faster for users to get things done on websites. Its static files are preloaded directly from the CDN. So the long processes that would have been involved if it were to be a server-side system are already sidetracked totally. Isn’t that incredible? As a matter of fact, the speed JAMstack produces cannot be countered by the best server-side technologies.
It might also interest you to know that the performance of your website in terms of its speed is crucial in search engine optimization (SEO) ranking. This is not just hearsay. Google has listed page speed as part of the factors that make the contents of websites and blogs rank high in searches. All you need to do is maintain a moderate use of external JavaScript. Once this is done, your web pages will load very fast.
So if your website users are complaining about your website’s sluggishness, JAMstack has all you need to make things right again.
2. Security
The degree of safety is a major distinguishing factor that would need to be considered before pronouncing a website as well-designed. JAMstack can help you enhance the security outfit of your sites. Are you wondering how this could be possible? Don’t worry; I will tell you what makes this true.
Servers of static websites do not have any plugins running on them. Maybe you don’t know that dependence on traditional server-side and CMS plugins exposes your website to some risks. With CMS plugins, your website becomes more vulnerable to attack vendors. You sure don’t want that for your site. Any time you build your websites to rely on CMS plugins, you should prepare for continuous patching and maintenance.
On the other hand, JAMstack websites are built with static files, greatly reducing their vulnerability. That the files are static does not imply they remain so when delivered. Immediately they are delivered to individual clients; you can make the experience dynamic to whatever degree you want with the use of JavaScript and APIs.
Though APIs could pose some security concerns on how to manage the accounts of users, with how to control and keep them secured. It’s nothing to get troubled about anyways.
Every detail and process associated with users’ accounts- account creation, sign-in options, and forgotten passwords - all require utmost care with proper management. Even if you cannot effectively handle this, there’re proven third-party solutions you can adopt.
3. Scalability
Every success-oriented business would always work towards growing the number of customers patronizing their product or service. If you ask a blogger today, one of his topmost desire would be for his traffic to keep increasing.
Scalability is the concept of web development that describes the ability of a website to meet the continuous increase in the number of users interacting with it. If a business will continuously win and retain the loyalty of its customers, the scalability of the website has to be top-notch. Only a scalable website will work effectively even when traffic spikes in thousands.
After inputting plenty of effort and money, you may be able to achieve good speed and security for your website using other web development architectures. But when it comes to developing a scalable website, you will hardly find a better match than JAMstack.
Because JAMstack does not use database servers, and delivery is executed directly from the Content Delivery Network (CDN), you can achieve scalability for your website at a ridiculously low price. Try to recall how much it cost you to scale your last database-driven website. You’d most definitely have spent less had you used JAMstack.
4. Lower Cost of Hosting and Maintenance
JAMstack websites being static websites, do not require much to host since they’re built on HTML. It’s no news that HTML consumes a smaller quantum of space when hosting than dynamic sites. So you won’t need to spend so much to host them on servers.
Once hosting is cost-efficient, maintenance cannot be expensive to carry out. It’s basically like hitting a gold mine of benefits! Designing websites that are fast, secured, and scalable at the start should not be your sole concern as a web developer. It takes constant maintenance to sustain those features.
Adequate maintenance would help you promptly identify security loopholes so you can take quick action to block them. Apart from keeping your site secured, another reason you can’t keep your arms folded on your website is for the content to retain visibility on search engines. Generally, websites that are updated constantly have a higher SEO ranking.
JAMstack can help you do all this at a low cost and even with less effort.
With Jamstack, you’re in total control of your web content. Your websites will function effectively without constant management since delivery is directly from the CDN. Again, you don’t need to worry about patching your site continually like you’d need to do if your website were database-driven.
Many functions have already been dealt with during the development stage too.
5. Developer Experience
Developer experience in this context is the user experience of a developer utilizing web development tools. I don’t think we need to explain what user experience is. It has already gained sufficient recognition and attention in the technological world. It is that power tool with which customers most times form their perception of a product.
JAMstack has more than one framework enabling you to choose a framework relating to your competence area. While it is imperative to keep improving the number of web development tools you can work with, time can be an obstacle. So even if you don’t have that luxury of time to learn programming languages, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS are more than enough to develop a great website.
What more can we say of JAMstack’s local environment that helps out with edge computing? The auto review feature also makes the entire web development process flexible. Your job also becomes much easier to deliver since third parties manage APIs. This is flexibility at its peak!
6. Cost-Effective
The last of the six benefits of JAMstack I’ll be sharing with you is its cost-efficiency. Don’t you agree that it is vain to do with more what you can easily achieve with less? JAMstack offers superb web development services at a relatively cheaper cost.
Conclusion
Like I said earlier, you don’t need much to host your JAMstack website on servers. Site maintenance is not demanding either, as some security concerns have already been dealt with while developing the site. Even scaling, which could have swallowed more funds, is likewise relatively cheaper due to the use of CDN.
