I’m heavily involved in building a big website from the ground up right now. One of the decisions we had to make in the early days was what sort of Technology to build the platform on.

 After much discussion we decided to go with a serverless technology using JAMSTACK and building a site based on the Hugo platform.  There were many platforms we could have chosen from including Gatsby, Jekyll and others.

Jamstack technology is great because it delivers sites that are really fast because it basically pre-rendered is all of the site Pages before they are served. So there are very few calls back and forth to servers.

With Jamstack, the entire front end is prebuilt into highly optimized static pages and assets during a build process. This process of pre-rendering results in sites which can be served directly from a CDN, reducing the cost, complexity and risk, of dynamic servers as critical infrastructure.

But be aware that there are some downsides to this approach.

The main downside is that it is quite bleeding-edge v the standard server-based technologies out there. This means that it is really hard to find people with the programming expertise to work on these platforms. It just means that you’ve got a much smaller pool of experts to pick from as you are developing the site.I’m based in Australia and this turned out to be quite difficult because there are almost zero freelance developers available here with  Hugo expertise and I didn’t really want to end up working with someone who was offshore all the time. And because these people are very in demand you end up with issues that they have to juggle several projects at once.

It also means that often you are limited in terms of integrating into other platforms using things like APIs. Once again, because it’s a relatively new technology most of the majors do not have pre-existing integrations into it yet. So you end up having to do a lot of stuff manually or learning as you go.

So you need to think hard and get as much experience input as possible before you make the key decision about what platform to build your site on as it will set you on a path that will become increasingly hard to divert from if you need to.