Save Time and Money

There are many reasons you might have for getting a new website but all too often the reasons driving the decision making are the wrong reasons. Designers want to sell design and coders want to sell exciting widgets. In most cases no thought is given to the user of the web site and what they need or want. After all if you make your users happy they want more of what you are promoting. One of the biggest turn offs for web site visitors is slow loading pages. Slow loading pages are often the result of too much fancy design and whizz bang widgets. “What is wrong with our existing dynamic CMS driven website?”, you ask. Let’s compare what happens when a visitor requests a page.

End Slow Page Loads

CMS systems like WordPress have to do more work to serve a page. When a web page is requested, the server must determine the request, run programming code to generate a database call, make a call to the database, create an HTML page (by inserting the data returned from the database into a template) and, finally, serve the requested page to the visitor. With all these steps required just to get the page to the visitor you can start to see that there could be room for improvement. Cutting the number of steps would be a start. If the site has a lot of requests then the choices are - make visitors wait or add more resources to allow your website handle the requests more quickly. adding more resources costs more money. Once the extra resources are in place you must cotinue to pay for them even though traffic does not always require their use. Additionally, unless the dynamic CMS has been distributed to data centers, all page requests are handled by the one unique version of the website. This one point of weakness design can be exploited in a number of ways by bad actors. Mitigating attacks requires yet more resources and costs.

Fast Page Loads as Standard

In comparison a Cloud Hosted Static Site interprets the request and immediately returns the requested page to the visitor. The Static Site is able to return a usable page to the visitor much faster. How? All the pages are generated in advance and distributed to multiple worldwide data centres close to visitors in all regions of the world. A dynamic site is much more complex due to its reliance on intermediary layers of programming code and database server. These extra layers mean that distribution of the website is highly complex and costs a lot of money. The distributed cloud based site can do everything that the modern organization would ever need and, with the addition of microservices, can achieve the same results as an expensive monolithic web application.