The web architecture continues to evolve. So is our approach to content publishing. There is no better way than to provide the best digital experience to the users.
Are you planning to launch an online news publication? It's always a great idea to start with the best possible solution, so that you're steps ahead to serve your online audience.
Do you want an ultra fast news media site? Safe from online attacks? Easier to maintain and scale?
Read on to find out more.
Powered by traditional web architecture design, most news websites encounter issues when having to serve traffic spikes: slowness, prone to online attacks, and higher cost for web servers and maintenance. But are there any way to deal with these issues?
How about "a modern web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup"?
In this blog post, we're introducing our in-house web architecture solution based on Jamstack (Javascript, APIs, and Markup) with Headless CMS (Content Management System).
Less is more
Why modern media needs the next-generation web architecture? Jamstack is a combination of the 3 most robust web technologies like Javascript, APIs, and Markup.
With a Jamstack web project, you don’t actually rely on server-side code — they can be distributed instead of relying on a server. Served directly from a Content Delivery Networks (CDN), your Jamstack website can handle speed, performance and offers the best user experience.
"A static website contains web pages with fixed content. Each page is coded in HTML an displays the same information to every visitor. Unlike dynamic websites, they do not require any server-side operations or database design."
Designed in the last couple of decades, traditional websites serve the purpose of making it easy to publish content and make it accessible. Unlike this approach of serving dynamic sites, Jamstack sites are static sites. Simplified, the design philosophy's benefits are:
- Faster
- More secure (no need to worry about server or database vulnerabilities)
- Easier to scale, lower cost (hosting of static files is cheap or even free)
- Resilient and efficient infrastructure
- SEO-friendly and ready
We'll have more details on these later in this blog post.
Headless CMS?
With a CMS you'll be handling everything in the same system.
But, by combining a headless CMS with Jamstack, you've got a simplified solution, making it lightweight and portable. So what's this Headless CMS? A headless CMS will let your content travel further and do more things than you can imagine.
A Headless CMS is different from your traditional CMS like WordPress that are built with back-end and front-end bundled into a single application that is web-first.
So you're decoupling all of these parts and handling them separately. Why? And what the main benefits?
Need for speed? Blazing fast!
How about shifting the workload from server-side to client-side? That's it. When we can take away as many tasks as possible and pushing them to the client side instead. We can enable fewer server requests. Thus, better performance and faster load times are the results. And to go as server-less as possible.
Google has set a new standard for page-speed with the introduction of its Core Web Vitals. So the website page speed is a search ranking factor. Visitors don't like slow loading sites. No readers want to wait to read the news stories.
Jamstack sites's pre-built (HTML) files served over a CDN are amazingly fast. There are interference or delays at the back-end.
So, at the core, the sites are highly optimized for SEO.
Cheaper and easier to scale
Jamstack sites only contain just a few files with minimal sizes. And these files can be served anywhere. Scaling is a matter of serving those files somewhere else or using your CDN of choice.
Fare more secure
The simple strategy here is that by decoupling of the backend and the frontend, we can minimize the security flaws. And the connection by an API (or Git-based) between the backend and frontend and will mostly be read-only. And at the same time, it's less dependable on a database, which is always the heart of the security issue.
Good to know
Since 2015, modern web revolution of Jamstack has started to take the web world by storm. In 2019, the movement became more mainstream.
What to read more: Modern Web Development on the JAMstack (Modern Techniques for Ultra Fast Sites and Web Application by Mathias Biilmann and Phil Hawksworth).
Case Study (Coming up): Kiripost
Kiripost is a dynamic media company. Kiripost.com is a static site, which means that there is no database and is serverless. Built with Next.js, its headless CMS is WagtailCMS. Ultra fast, Cloudflare Pages is a JAMstack platform for frontend development (for its edge network and the Git integration).
The essences of today and tomorrow's web standards are here, especially for online news publication.
This post was first appeared on Kokitree: https://kokitree.com/posts/next-generation-web-publishing-for-modern-media/
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