Why we choose to build with the Jamstack

What is a Jamstack?

There are many ways to build websites. When the internet was first conceived, everything was written in plain text files. Slowly, we added styling and images, databases, animations and almost any type of function you could think of. Now, with so many different competing technologies, there’s no one “right” system to use.

Jamstack gets its name from JavaScript, API and Markup; three very simple building blocks for websites. If you’re interested in the technical side or the history of the stack, https://jamstack.org/ and https://jamstack.wtf/ are good places to start.

What Jamstack technologies really provide us with is a way to decouple aspects of a website from each other. It is no longer required to choose one system and stick with it, instead, pick and choose the best parts of many systems. This also means that systems that traditionally couldn’t be used together can now be built into websites or apps!

Why we love to use decoupled technologies

A decoupled system is one that is completely independent of itself. Say your website has an online shop and a blog, two very common pages for a business to have. You may want to use Square or Stripe for inventory management and payment processing. But neither of those are good systems for a blog. So do you drop the blog and only have a shop?

Decoupling the blog and shop from the rest of the site means a system like Stripe or Square can manage the shop page, while a nice blogging platform like WordPress can be used as a content management system (CMS). And best of all, we don’t have to rely on either to generate the final website, giving us complete control of the design, development and search engine optimisation (SEO). Jamstack websites are often faster, more secure and easier to scale.

Is a decoupled or Jamstack website right for you?

We would claim that any website can be built using headless, decoupled, Jamstack technologies. The question is whether you can build and maintain one. Websites using these types of decoupled systems are normally managed by experienced and knowledgeable developers. But this doesn’t mean your business shouldn’t have access to running one.

Transitioning your existing website and data to a decoupled system is easy. All of our website services at Brolga Digital can be built with the Jamstack, letting you choose the platforms you’re most comfortable using. And maintenance is a breeze with our Managed Website Plans, taking away all the hard technical work.

We’re built with Jamstack Technologies

As one last little note, Brolga Digital’s website is built using these technologies. We used NetlifyCMS, Gatsby and UiKit. While you might not understand what these frameworks are, you can see just how fast our website loads! Best of all, these particular systems are all open-source, another cause dear to our hearts.