We are seeing growing interest in Jamstack development as we receive many inquiries about migration to this architecture lately. Because of that, we decided to share our questionnaire that helps with collecting information and project requirements.
It helps us decide whether Jamstack is a good fit for a particular project, how long migration will take, and its cost. Also, it’s a great method to predict risks connected with such a migration.
Why do people migrate to Jamstack?
Excellent user experience and page load speed are two main things taken into account not only by Google bots but – more importantly – by real users and customers. When at least one of two disappoints them, they may leave your website or webshop and never come back. Therefore, companies are always looking for modern technologies that will help them take care of their website’s user experience and page load speed.
Some of them found out that Jamstack is a great solution because it offers three main benefits:
- Better conversion rates, thanks to:
- High performance
- Great user experience
- Stability and reliability of the website
- Bigger traffic, thanks to:
- SEO optimisation (server-side rendering / static generation)
- Better Google PageSpeed results
- Easier maintenance, thanks to:
- Better security
- Low hosting cost
- Leveraging modern frontend frameworks
The number of Jamstack advocates grows systematically, and more and more companies decide to migrate their websites to this SEO and user-friendly architecture.
However, before you also make such a decision, we recommend you consider different technical scenarios. One of those scenarios is working with external teams, agencies, or developers, and it will be much easier and more efficient for you to be prepared before the work even starts.
A questionnaire is extremely helpful, as we, as an agency, need to make sure that Jamstack is the right solution for your specific case. It also helps us get to know the scope of work and collect project requirements much easier.
After that, we will suggest the correct approach, give the alternatives, and ultimately, choose the right technology stack.
And finally, you can use this questionnaire to prepare a perfect brief for internal and external development resources.
Moving to Jamstack: The Discovery Stage
In short, the discovery stage is the stage before the development itself, and the primary goal is to collect all the necessary information. It leads to a better understanding of project requirements and helps to select appropriate technologies and other tools. The end result of the discovery stage is the scope of work and project estimation.
At this stage, it’s also worth thinking about doing additional research and analysis based on the data from Google Analytics (and other tools) and interviews with real users. It may be helpful to find out what users want and plan migration including desired changes.
What you can also include in this stage is competition research and technology trends overview which may give you some tips about what’s working and what functionalities may be helpful.
Of course, you may be already familiar with best practices, and pretty sure about what you want to do. However, it’s still a good idea to double-check if specific functionalities will truly be able to deliver desired results and are aligned with your company objectives (yes, technology can do that). Especially in such an important moment of change that you will be working with for years to come.
Discovery Stage Questionnaire
Our questionnaire is a part of the discovery stage (before any migration to Jamstack). It’s a document collecting all necessary information about a new website and is divided into three parts:
- Website content architecture
- Website functionalities
- Data & Integrations
We will describe these sections separately and provide examples so it will be easier for you to understand the questionnaire and fill it out. Moreover, you will find a downloadable questionnaire at the bottom of this blog post.
Section 1: Website content
If we want to migrate a website, it means there is a current version, containing content that will also be on a new website. Therefore, we have to check a few things before migration:
- What and how many pages are there
- How pages are connected
- How content is being displayed
- How does the old sitemap look like
- How the new sitemap will look like
In other words, we collect all the content that we will migrate and check what content we want to add. Later, we are checking if these pages use reusable layouts or blocks, which we will be implementing during development.
Examples of page types
- Home Page
- About Us Page
- Blog Listing Page
- Careers Page
- Contact Page
Examples of general page templates
- Home Page Template
- Case Study Template
- Product Details Template
- Job Offer Details Template
- Blog Post Template
- Landing Page Template
Section 2: Website functionalities
If we already checked what content will be on the new website, we must define how users can interact with it. In other words, what functionalities we will need to implement.
It’s a place to write down all functional requirements to check if we can implement all of them using Jamstack. It’s also worth adding functionalities connected with website management (such as the admin panel).
Additionally, we need to keep in mind non-functional requirements such as page load speed, security, scalability, performance, etc.
Examples of functional requirements
- Creating landing pages in an easy way using block builder
- Commenting feature
- Search feature
- Newsletter form
- Contact form
- Google Maps integration
Examples of non-functional requirements
- Reducing page weight to … kb
- Reducing page load speed to … seconds
- Reducing website build time to ... seconds
Section 3: Data & Integrations
In this section, we have to collect information about external data sources like headless CMSes. We have to know what data needs to be processed and displayed. We also discuss every third-party integration with a website – like analytics or marketing tools – and data coming from users like messages sent through the contact form.
Examples of data sources
- Headless CMS (Sanity, Kentico Kontent, Strapi)
- Spreadsheets (Airtable, Google Sheets)
- PIM (Product Information Management) Platform
- Files (text, MD files)
Examples of third-party integrations
- Google Analytics Integration
- Facebook Pixel implementation
- Newsletter
- Marketing automation tools
- CRM
Choosing Jamstack tools for the job
The easy part is over. Now it’s time to choose tools for the Jamstack development which should be much easier after filling out the questionnaire and collecting all the necessary information and requirements.
You will need:
- Static site generators like Gatsby or Next.js
- Headless CMS like Sanity
- CI/CD tool like Netlify Build
- Global hosting like Netlify ADN
Any good development agency specialising in Jamstack will help you with that by matching tools to needs.
What’s next?
You already know the necessary steps to prepare for a migration to Jamstack, so now it’s time to sit down and fill out the questionnaire.
Below you will find a link to Google Drive to download a file with the same sections to fill as described in this blog post.
Planning migration to Jamstack?
Download Questionnaire
Further readings
If you want to learn more about Jamstack itself, please read these articles:
- Why You Should Build a Jamstack Website?
- Is Jamstack the Best Web Tech Stack for 2021?
- Benefits of Jamstack development
- Why Use Jamstack for eCommerce in 2021?
- Migration From WordPress To Jamstack – A Complete Guide
If you want to learn more about benefits and best use cases for Jamstack, we ran an interview with one of the top experts from development community:
Top comments (0)