Introduction

These days online customers’ expectations are higher than ever before. It pushes companies to look for competitive advantages and creates a lot of space for modern technologies to improve. And these are supposed to not only help companies with meeting these expectations but also solve more problems along the way, like:

Slow page loading which means poor UX and leads to low conversion rates
The necessity to use third-party tools for landing pages creation
Expensive hosting and maintenance
Being limited by CMS, eCommerce, or other platforms
Security issues

To deal with that, you can choose one of the following tech stacks – MEAN, LAMP and JAMstack, which are the most popular and commonly used solutions out there. However, instead of describing all of them and leaving a decision in your hands, we will make it for you.

Meet JAMstack – a tech stack of our choice for 2021.

What is JAMstack?

JAMstack isn’t some new technology – it’s a mix of JavaScript frameworks, APIs and Markup.

Elements of JAMstack:

JavaScript – responsible for handling dynamic programming during the request/response cycle
APIs – responsible for handling all server-side databases and database actions, which are then accessed through HTTPS with JavaScript
Markup – responsible for what users will see which can be pre-build with Gatsby, for example.

The main goal of JAMstack is to help developers build faster, more secure, and easier to scale websites, webshops and other applications. It allows them to use tools and workflows that support productivity and which they already know well.

JAMstack best use cases

Although there is almost no limitation to what you can create with JAMstack, there are some cases when it shines.

Webshops – as shops built with JAMstack are superfast and offer unique user experience, help you engage customers and achieve higher Google rankings. Ultimately, it leads to higher conversion rates.
Custom landing pages – thanks to reusable components, JAMstack helps you to create landing pages faster and easier. Even if you are not a developer.
Software and SaaS – treat your product website as a business card. And with JAMstack you will stand out thanks to a great first impression and ultimate performance.

Benefits of JAMstack

Now, let’s talk about things business owners, marketers and developers love about JAMstack. Additionally, you will learn some extra benefits of JAMstack for eCommerce.

Unique user experience

In the digital world full of similar websites and webshops, creating a custom layout can make all the difference. And it’s not only about the first impression visitors get – it’s also about making sure that the customer journey is simple and pleasant. Moreover, such sites or online shops should be fast, so they load in the blink of an eye.

And JAMstack helps you to achieve all of that. You can build your website or webshop just the way you want without compromising the speed or features you want to have. Moreover, as JAMstack websites are static, they are extremely fast, and that’s what visitors expect.

However, user experience is also vital to Google's perspective. Although we don’t know how Google measures the satisfaction of users from using particular websites or webshops, they provided some suggestions regarding what’s crucial for excellent user experience:

Easy to read and useful content
Responsive design
Site architecture that’s clear and well-organised

SEO efficiency

The goal of each website or webshop owner should be to get as high as possible in Google rankings, leading to more organic traffic and more leads. And to do so, such a website or webshop needs to be SEO efficient.

Surprise, surprise, JAMstack websites are! They are fast, light and easy to scan by Google crawlers, and that’s what Google rewards with better rankings.

Choosing JAMstack also means getting full control over the website’s content and structure, which is part of SEO. You can easily add custom metadata like page titles, meta descriptions and alt text, which helps search engines read and index your website’s content. It’s easy to do because websites or webshops built on JAMstack consist of HTML files which also helps solve typical problems with improving search engine optimisation.

Also, Google rewards high-performant and fast websites with higher rankings as speed is one of the most important ranking factors.

Speed and performance

Websites created with JAMstack amaze users with their page load speed. In other words, you will stop losing clients because your website’s performance is poor.

The website’s page load speed is also an important SEO ranking factor and a crucial element of great user experience.

JAMstack website pre-generates specific pages at a build time instead of request time. Because of that, all the website pages are stored on a Content Delivery Network that’s closest to the user visiting a website. It ensures high performance without a need for investing in expensive solutions.

Readiness for high traffic

Popular websites try to cope with increasing traffic by caching pages which require some work (it doesn’t happen by default). On the contrary, JAMstack website makes it done without any additional effort. As I already mentioned, these sites can be served entirely from CDN (Content Delivery Network), so there is no need for additional logic or workflow.

Using CDN also means simpler deployments, built-in redundancy and awesome load capacity.

Omnichannel approach

As statistics show, more than half of users browse the Internet on mobile devices. And since JAMstack makes sure that your website or webshop works perfectly on any device and any format, you can aim to convert both web and mobile visitors.

Becoming future-proof

While planning a website or webshop, one of the essential things should be its agility for further changes. In other words, marketers should treat their website as a continually improving tool to generate traffic and leads. Easy to edit, easy to implement new features and functionalities, etc. Website is not a “once-done-works-perfectly” thing anymore.

Using outdated technologies brings the risk of competition outrunning you. Additionally, later you will have to put more effort, and it will cost you more time and money to transform your online business into an innovative one.

Therefore, now it’s a great time to make it future-proof by starting to use JAMstack. This way, you won’t have to worry about adapting to technology changes for the next few years.

Headless integration

It’s a great example of becoming a future-proof business. If you haven’t heard about it yet, it’s a new way of improving integration with eCommerce platforms or Content Management Systems. Such integration aims to avoid editing limitations and create a website or webshops as you want it. It’s also a way of boosting up the performance and SEO efforts.

Greater security

Traditional server-side and CMS applications are vulnerable to attacks because of several different APIs and services they use. Although it’s necessary so administrators can manage data and content, such applications need to be taken care of daily.

Such a risk does not apply to static websites because they consist of read-only files. There is no active connection between a static site and any database or server-side software. Consequently, there are no vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit and data or other sensitive information to possess.

Huge availability of developers

Developers want to work with hot technologies which won’t cool down as fast as water in the glass – and JAMstack is a great example of such technology. There are many JAMstack developers who will help you even if you don’t have in-house JAMstack expertise.

Such availability is huge because developers can choose some technologies they already know instead of learning new frameworks or tools.

Cheap and portable hosting

Hosting static pages is much cheaper or even free because of their weight. Additionally, you can use any hosting you like or change it quickly and effortlessly anytime.

Maintainability

Static websites built with JAMstack are not only portable but also maintainable. And what it means is that such websites don’t require an administrator keeping an eye on them 24/7 to keep running.

It’s because the most important work was done during the development process. The necessity of server patching, updating and maintaining practically vanishes.

Ready-to-use components and features

Possibility to copy and paste many pre-made components and features drastically boost the development process. If you have some coding knowledge, you can build the next pages by yourself without involving developers into that process. And that’s because the process is like “copy, paste, edit”.

Additional benefits of JAMstack for eCommerce

And now, let’s focus only on eCommerce and the benefits of JAMstack for webshops. Some of them are quite similar to those already mentioned, but I will talk about them just from an eCommerce perspective.

You can sell your products everywhere

Creating a JAMstack online store means decoupling the front-end and the back-end. Because of that, you have freedom of publishing and displaying your products on multiple online platforms with Amazon and Facebook in the lead.

JAMstack also allows you to manage all digital sales channels in one place instead of checking data in every channel one by one.

Improved time to market

Better developer experience thanks to, i.e. reusable components means improved time to market. Apart from boosting the development process, JAMstack also helps develop new features or implement changes faster because it’s possible to work on front-end and back-end layers separately.

That way, you can go online faster in comparison to building everything from scratch.

Unlimited experience possibilities

JAMstack allows you to build a custom storefront for your customers which provides unique shopping experiences and makes you truly stand out from the competition. In other words, now the time has come to have total freedom of designing a front-end layer finally.

What’s more?

You can add new customer touchpoints (points where customers meet brand) without the necessity of using additional software.
You can build a custom storefront or PWA based on BigCommerce, Shopify or some other eCommerce platform.
JavaScript SDKs like those provided by Shopify will help you to create a user-friendly shopping experience.
If you have more than one customer group, you can design a unique experience for each one of them.

It costs less than a traditional approach

Another one of benefits of JAMstack is its cost.

First of all, hosting will cost you less because static websites don’t take much storage space. Second of all, development costs will be lower than building everything from scratch. Third, maintenance of such a webshop is less painful, so, consequently, it may appear cheaper.

Better developer experience

Developers don’t have to take care of everything, from implementing layout to connecting it with the back-end layer. As JAMstack makes it possible to use APIs, developers can rely on eCommerce solutions like Shopify and focus on creating a front-end layer. It results in a drop in development time and cost.