How the Jamstack approach can significantly speed up website development
A business suffers losses if it does not bring a product to market on time due to protracted development. There is a research that shows that a product that is six months late generates 33% less profit over five years; if it is released on time, but exceeds the budget by 50%, this leads to a decrease in profits by only 4%.
It's all about the right product, the right choice of place and time. This simple ancient truth explains everything well, but a lot has changed thanks to the emergence of new digital technologies.
To illustrate the point, let’s talk about websites. In the past, they were usually based on monolithic architectures, with the frontend being tightly coupled with the back end, particularly when using WordPress or Drupal content management systems.
Monolithic architectures were considered the primary way to build web applications. They have influenced not only how sites work, but how efficiently and quickly they are developed, and even the mindset of developers.
Often, with this approach, the launch of the first demo of the project can take several months, and each change may require complex deployment steps (for example, a complete re-upload of the site to FTP). The time to market increases dramatically as well.
In general, the picture is sad: almost 80% of new products are late with the release. On the other hand, companies have a good opportunity to increase sales and profits by reducing time to market (TTM). Most likely, your company also has such an opportunity. But how can this be achieved?
What is time to market value (TTM)?
Time to market (abbreviated as TTM) is the period from the appearance of an idea to the release of a product. Or, if you prefer, the time from the team's start of the work to the first sale. This is one of the most important indicators of the effectiveness of product development: research has shown that new entrants to the market always have advantages over those who are not working as fast. Many product development strategies only work if the company is the first to enter the market.
In the case of a website, a fast time to market will help you to immediately enter a new niche and start selling within the first month or even faster. Also important is the speed of loading and operation of the site and the ability to quickly make changes without having to waste time on complex deployments. Let's not forget about SEO as well.
All this, and much more, is already practised in the JAMstack approach.
What are Jamstack websites?
What is the JAMstack? The first three letters stand for JavaScript, APIs and markup - the three main components used to build JAMstack websites. JAMstack sites perform well with a mobile-first approach, where load time is the most important metric, with bandwidth ranging from a dead 2g to a full 5g.
The JAMstack is not one specific technology; it is not owned or operated by any large company; it does not have a standards body to oversee it.
The JAMstack is more of a developer movement, a collection of community best practices and workflows that aims to create fast websites that are easy and enjoyable to develop, maintain, and scale.
How does the Jamstack approach reduce time to market?
First, the speed of project completion is faster than ever. Reduction of development time can reach 30-50%. This, in particular, is due to the fact that when developing with the JAMstack, we only need to set up a local development environment, push the changes to the remote Git repository, and the site will be deployed automatically to the CDN after each commit.
Basically, we just need to make sure the projects work in our local environment, which means they will work in production as well. That is, the deployment to production occurs in the same way as the deployment of the demo (staging version) - during development. There is almost no deployment time! That's all. And in today's world, getting to market quickly is critical to the success of your business.
Second, with the Jamstack approach, we mostly use third-party services for data storage, authentication, full-text search, and so on. Using third-party solutions and their API saves us from having to write and maintain our own backend infrastructure. This not only reduces the deployment time of the first version of the web application and subsequent updates, but also increases security: there is no backend, nothing to crash as a result of a hacker attack.
Conclusion
As you can see, the use of modern technologies, in particular the JAMstack approach, significantly reduces the time to market and helps the business to start selling immediately. If you need advice on the architecture of the JAMstack or want to learn more about this approach, then contact us using our form.