Three essential web tools for your tech stack

Optimising your website development tech stack is essential to creating a strong digital presence. Your website tech stack is the technologies that are used to build and operate your website. These all contribute to building the overall digital ecosystem that can help you achieve your business goals.

Using industry-leading services and apps to create your website can improve speed, functionality and ease of doing business. Ultimately, combining best-in-class tools to piece your digital presence together will allow your organisation to become future-proof in any advancements in technology.

We discussed building your website tech stack in our latest Digitime webinar - watch the full video here. In this session, we focussed on 3 tools including Netlify, Algolia and Jotform which not only improve the performance and functionality of websites but also allows for a faster and more efficient development process.

Managing these tech tools

Our headless Craft CMS approach to website development also allows the front end to be separate from the back end resulting in more tools to be integrated and a more powerful website.

Using this headless approach allows the integration of Jamstack architecture. This technology uses JavaScript and APIs to essentially grab your content and your services from other systems and put them into static websites. Pre-rendering and decoupling your content will improve the overall performance and security of your website.

You have greater flexibility over where these sites are hosted and ensure websites are easily maintained and more portable than ever before. Jamstack ultimately future proofs your website because the website you build on day one will be very different to the website you have on day 365, and allows any potential future microservices to be changed, at the time you built it.

Netlify

Integrated within this architecture is Netlify, a hosting service, that allows you to easily preview website builds before launching them. The tool is where the front-facing content sits and lowers the barrier to entry of actually generating static websites on the fly.

Previously, a team of 15 developers with a very specific skill set had to go through command lines typing code to create these static websites. Now, we can generate these sites at the click of a button making development much more efficient. These static sites, by default, offer faster page load times and are friendlier to search engine crawlers, improving your SEO position.

New features are also constantly being added to Netlify such as split testing which will allow you to easily do A/B testing gaining valuable insights on your website performance.

Algolia

A common request we get from clients is how do we have a search function that works? Our solution is Algolia which is a thirst party system that uses Search APIs to provide fast and efficient search results. This system is constantly improved and maintained by Algolia to provide a powerful front end search experience.

Watch a snippet from our Digitime webinar where we use a real-life example from Mountain Goat on how we enhanced their beer finder search experience.

Jotform

Another low cost, easy to integrate tool that we use with many clients is Jotform. A form is an essential component of any website and the powerful Jotform makes this creation as seamless as possible. Similar to Netlify, every website can have a search functionality or a form but not all of these are efficient and powerful and both are very simple solutions to problems that can be frustrating

Offering integrations with many marketing services, CRMs and storage apps ensures that no information is lost. The tool is also very developer-friendly with clients able to build forms online, styling with their own fonts, logos and colours.