WRI 2024 and Google Lighthouse

Jamstack delivers performance, but how do we know it when we see it? Well, for one, the site looks professional. It reacts quickly to inputs. Objects stay in one place when the page loads. The website looks and works well on any device. It's easy to use and many more things. Google went so far as to categorize what factors it considers websites must have to ensure a great user experience.

The Test Scores

Google Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool designed to improve the quality of web pages. It provides audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and adherence to best practices.

Areas of Measure:

• Performance = Measures the speed and overall responsiveness of a website, focusing on the time it takes for content to load and become interactive for the user.

• Accessibility = Assesses how accessible a website is to a wide range of users, including those with disabilities, ensuring that content is accessible through screen readers and other assistive technologies.

• Best Practices = Evaluates the use of modern web development best practices aimed at optimizing website quality, including security, image optimization, and correct use of web standards.

• SEO = Analyzes a website's search engine optimization, checking for practices that improve a site's visibility to search engines and its compliance with SEO guidelines, such as meta tags and descriptive link text.

High Google Lighthouse scores signify a website's excellence across multiple dimensions of web development, including performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO.

What is Jamstack, exactly?

Jamstack is an architectural approach that decouples the web experience layer from data and business logic, improving flexibility, scalability, performance, and maintainability. Jamstack removes the need for business logic to dictate the web experience. As such, we can develop website front ends that focus on delivering a great experience for the user. It turns out that this is incredibly valuable, particularly when trying to rank on Google!

This approach prioritizes:

1. Page delivery speed
2. Higher search rankings
3. Delightful user experiences
4. Improved security
5. Lower maintenance costs

By leveraging Jamstack architecture, Light. Speed. delivers fast, secure, and highly efficient websites that perform well in today’s competitive digital landscape.

What Benefits Does Jamstack Provide?

"A modern web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup (the JAM in Jamstack)."

— Mathias Biilmann (CEO & Co-founder of Netlify).

Let’s get in the weeds a bit and introduce you to some important web jargon you should know as a business owner or marketing manager. The term Jamstack was coined by Mathias Biilmann, CEO of Netlify, which is a cloud platform for deploying websites and apps, based on the acronym JAM which stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. This modern web development architecture separates the frontend from backend apps and databases. Freed from backend servers, the frontend can then be deployed globally, directly to a CDN or Content Delivery Network. Here are the key points:

Jamstack provides Pre-rendering:

Pages are built at deploy time, resulting in static HTML files that load quickly (the browser does less work and pages appear quickly).

Jamstack promotes Decoupling:

Decoupling is the process of creating a clean separation between systems or services. By decoupling the services needed to operate a site, each component part can become easier to reason about, can be independently swapped out or upgraded, and can be designated the purview of dedicated specialists either within an organization or as a third party. The separation of frontend and backend allows for greater flexibility and scalability.

Jamstack supports Dynamic Functionalities:

JavaScript and APIs handle interactive elements without sacrificing speed. We’ll get into this more a bit later.

This architecture not only improves performance but also enhances security and scalability. By serving pre-built static files, Jamstack sites drastically reduce the attack surface, making them inherently more secure. Additionally, the use of CDNs allows for effortless scaling, ensuring your site can handle traffic spikes without additional infrastructure costs.

While the jargon is important for a more detailed understanding and discussion of technology decisions behind any business’s website or application, what’s really important for managers to understand are the benefits Jamstack provides.

The problem with the legacy web is that we’re at a point where many companies have traditional operations that depend on a web server (or many of them), that have to run complex applications all of the time. Running websites and applications like this slows things down, provides way too many opportunities for attacks, and is expensive to scale. Moreover, it’s costly in terms of needing large development teams and high maintenance costs.

The solution?

While not every company can benefit from this approach, many can. I will be the first to advocate for the right tool for the job, but I’m continually surprised at how many can benefit from a Light. Speed. solution. Simplify!

Move from web servers to CDNs

A Jamstack deployment doesn’t run on a traditional setup of origin servers. Instead, automated deployments are used to push sites directly to the Edge / CDN.

Prerender web pages for speed

Rather than building content at runtime for each request, content is prebuilt and optimized during a build setup using a site generator and other build tools.

Move from monolithic apps to APIs & Microservices

Decoupling the frontend from the backend allows for more modular development where we can take advantage of the huge ecosystem of third-party tools to provide website functionality.

The result is a faster website, higher Google search rankings, high scaling without high complexity, and you can launch your sites & apps faster (smaller teams, happier devs, and faster deployment cycles).

Summary of Jamstack Benefits

In summary, Jamstack offers a compelling mix of performance, security, and flexibility, making it an ideal architecture for modern digital marketing strategies. The benefits to WRI extend across SEO, content delivery, user experience, security, accessibility, and operational efficiency, providing a platform that will withstand the rigors of many years of service.