WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content Management System) that powers more than 43% of the web, according to the W3Techs surveys in September 2022. It's beginner friendly, has many plugins, and is simple. However, it is not without drawbacks. In this article, I'll share my insights about "Why you should migrate from WordPress blogs to Jamstack?". 

WordPress develops websites using the LAMP stack, which consists of the PHP programming language, the MySQL database management system, the Apache HTTP Server, and the Linux operating system. Through their browsers, users can request pages, which the PHP will handle and parse before querying its database to display content.

What is Jamstack?

Jamstack, originally cased as JAM stack where JAM stood for Javascript, APIs, and Markup, was introduced by Mathias Biilmann, CEO of Netlify in 2015. Jamstack is a web architecture that has revolutionized the way of thinking about building the web. Unlike the traditional model, Jamstack separates the front end and the back end. This means that developers are free to use their preferred tools and frameworks to create static websites and web apps because there is no monolithic CMS that is bound to a database. 

If you're interested in reading about this architecture, you can check What is Jamstack? article from Jamstack.org.

The Benefits of using Jamstack

Jamstack's popularity is rising quickly. According to HTTP Archive, the number of Jamstack websites increased by 50% from 2020 to 2021. Not only are these bigger sites, either. In all industries combined, 32% of Jamstack engineers were employed by multimillion-dollar companies in 2021. Why exactly are businesses moving towards Jamstack? What makes it such a better option than WordPress? Here are some of the main reasons why Jamstack is better than most WordPress websites.

Blazing Fast

Jamstack websites can be blazingly fast right out of the box because they are using static site generators (SSG), prebuilt and distributed to a global edge network. Additionally, because of their deployment architecture's simplicity, maintaining and enhancing page speed is also considerably simpler.

WordPress uses server-side rendering, on the other hand, takes a lot of effort to make it faster. From database optimization to caching. Making WordPress fast is a time-consuming effort since whenever you make a significant modification to a WordPress site, all of your earlier performance work needs to be redone.

Here is a brief comparison of both strategies. The image depicts a condensed representation of what is going on within.

Lampstack vs Jamstack comparison

Better SEO

Faster page loading time also means better Google PageSpeed results. Then, better PageSpeed results will put your website on a higher ranking of search engine results. 

Since at least 2010, Google has used speed as a ranking element. Google's search algorithm would start factoring speed into search result rankings, according to an announcement made in April 2010:

“Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed – that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.”

This update is applied to desktop search results, and what’s considered fast on a desktop may load comparatively slow on a mobile device. To be sure, mobile searchers were still getting served frustratingly slow pages – that is, until nearly a decade later. In July 2018, Google made page speed a ranking factor for mobile search results.

Efficient

Maintenance for WordPress can be difficult. It contains an ecosystem of plugins and themes that may easily get very complex. You'll encounter more problems and conflicts between plugins, themes, and the CMS itself the more sophisticated your site is.

This could result in your team concentrating on fixing plugin problems rather than how to develop and expand your business.

Jamstack significantly decreases the need for this and other types of maintenance. A website can be deployed with minimal ongoing maintenance once it is stable. As a result, your staff will have less time to focus on plugin problems and more time to develop upgrades that will benefit both your company and users.

Nowadays, many awesome serverless platforms allow you to launch Jamstack websites without fiddling with servers, such as Netlify, Vercel, Gatsby Cloud, etc. Those platforms allow you to use it starting from $0 or free.

Scalability

Your website must be scalable to accommodate a spike in traffic, whether it occurs on a single day or gradually over time.

Every company strives to develop further and modify its offering. Having a website that can handle an increase in traffic could make the difference between success and failure for your business, whether it is growing steadily or is about to launch the next big thing.

A website can crash when there is a mismatch between the amount of traffic and the infrastructure's capabilities. Clicking buttons, adding items to carts, searching for products, and entering passwords are just a few examples of how site users generate system requests that are more than your servers and/or any third-party systems engaged in the visitor experience can handle. Your website will get slower, stall, or crash when this occurs.

Jamstack websites are designed for scalability, allowing you to focus more on keeping your business ahead of its competition as it expands rather than worrying about the architecture of your website.

Security

It's important to keep in mind that third-party WordPress plugins frequently have security vulnerabilities. Your website being hacked might cost you a lot of money. Due to a vulnerability in one of my client's WordPress websites, they have to close theirs and lost their sales for about two weeks to recover from being hacked.

Because Jamstack sites only serve static pages, which are impossible to hack, you can be sure that the possibility of third-party security vulnerabilities is eliminated. As a result, the Jamstack technique is practically impervious to DDoS, security flaws in third-party plugins, and many other typical risks you typically have to be concerned about with WordPress.

Conclusion

WordPress is excellent for some small businesses and portfolio websites, but you need a scalable architecture if you want to reach a wider audience. Digital experiences driven by Jamstack are considerably more scalable. When you perform a Jamstack migration, you immediately provide your marketing and development teams with the resources they need to collaborate effectively and produce audience-pleasing static sites and applications that convert quickly.

Need help to migrate from WordPress to Jamstack? I can help you out, contact me to discuss more further.