Recently, we were thinking about refreshing our website. In fact, it’s something that’s been on our TODO list since we launched our current iteration. But, before we set out to build, we needed a plan and a list of priorities.
- No WordPress, just pure vanilla PHP.
- Easy to update.
- Clean, modern design.
- So lightweight that can be hosted on a toaster (no, we haven’t tried this… yet. We’re just looking for a toaster that can run a LAMP stack).
I want to touch on the first point - No WordPress. We’ve been using WordPress as our main site CMS since 2016. That year, we were using a static website, which we had always done in the past. Why did we switch to WordPress? Because it was easier to maintain. No website files to update and maintain. Just create the content, switch themes when you want to update the look, and there you have it - a new site. Well, our website gained a lot of tech debt. We became reliant on plugin after plugin which caused our site to slow down. This lead us to use more plugins to speed it up - and more external configurations. We’ve had to tweak Cloudflare, CDNs, and caching. It made our website fragile. You change the wrong thing in the wrong place, it could cause things to slow down or break. It’s not too uncommon when creating content that we have some broken pages. While WordPress might power 40% (or more) of websites out there and many of our client’s websites, it’s no longer for us. We require too much custom code and integrations and it’s easier when we have full control over the entire thing.
Next up: easy to update. This is actually pretty easy. We went with Bootstrap 5 as it’s a great framework, well documented, and well used. That means it’s easy to update to newer versions as we see fit. Unlike WordPress and plugins, there’s no major security issues.
Our next priority of a clean and modern design is also accomplished because of Bootstrap. We used custom CSS to override some of Boostrap’s quirks. While our WordPress template is also based on Bootstrap, it’s a WordPress template. We’re limited to what the developers of the template say we can do and how they say we can make it look. No more. Our only limit is our technical knowledge and limits of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
Finally, so lightweight that it can be hosted on a toaster. No, seriously. The load of the website is now so much lighter since PHP doesn’t have to work as hard. We could probably load balance our website on a cluster of toasters and it would still be as fast and as responsive! Another thing is that it’s also lightweight on YOU, the visitor. For example, our current home page downloads 10.33 MB of data. Our new home page downloads 150.51 KB! That means our new home page is 193% more lightweight!
Want to check out our new website? Good news! It’s fully functional while we continue to put the final touches on it. Visit it at https://preview.nodespace.com and you can report feedback to us. Don’t worry about 404’s - those automatically open up issues for now.
We’re excited to hear your thoughts!