Part 2: How Global Brands Are Embracing JAMstack

Introduction

In Part 1 of this article series, we explored the growing drawbacks of monolithic content management systems like WordPress and Drupal. Their tight bundling and server-side rendering make customization, performance, and upgrades increasingly challenging.

Legacy CMS platforms restrict teams from leveraging modern frameworks and limit the ability to integrate new capabilities as they emerge. Organizations require greater flexibility and developer velocity to craft excellent digital experiences.

This article covers how the JAMstack approach provides the agility and innovation needed to thrive. By decoupling the frontend, backend, and data tiers, JAMstack unlocks new possibilities.

We'll also highlight real-world examples of global brands already adopting JAMstack architectures to deliver better customer experiences across channels. The benefits of transitioning from monoliths to modular are clear.

Join us as we explore how leading organizations embrace JAMstack to drive growth by optimizing their architecture for speed, creativity, and the future. The time for change is now.

JAMstack Benefits

In contrast to monolithic CMS platforms, JAMstack architectures provide greater flexibility, better performance, and room for unlimited innovation through their decoupled nature:

Freedom and Flexibility to Innovate

JAMstack architectures allow organizations to take full control over their technology stacks. Teams can select the optimal combination of frontend, backend, database and API technologies for their needs instead of being restricted to an all-in-one vendor solution.

This freedom empowers developers to leverage modern frameworks like React, Vue and Svelte to build great user experiences without constraints. There's no need to work within the limitations of legacy monolithic systems.

For example, by rebuilding its mobile app using React Native and decoupled APIs, Starbucks was able to unlock greater innovation and customization capabilities. Starbucks saw mobile app file size reduced by 99.84%, from 148MB to just 233kb, after moving to React Native. The modular architecture also accelerated their ability to release new features and improvements.

The flexible nature of JAMstack allows organizations to stay at the leading edge by swapping out components over time as new and improved technologies emerge. The future remains in your control.

Easy Integration of New Tools/Services

Connecting new services like a headless CMS, e-commerce engine, marketing platform, or AI technology is simple with API-based JAMstack architectures. With a decoupled structure, new capabilities can be added by integrating their APIs without disrupting everything else.

For example, AI technologies like chatbots, recommendation engines, natural language processing, and more are typically accessed via APIs. JAMstack provides the flexibility to incorporate these emerging capabilities as they advance easily.

Legacy monolithic CMS platforms would require complex custom plugins and still lack the ability to take advantage of the latest AI innovations. But with JAMstack, integrating new optimized APIs is clean and fast. This allows organizations to future-proof their stacks and take advantage of the latest technologies.

Adobe Experience Manager - Adobe adopted JAMstack technologies like GraphQL in their Experience Manager web CMS platform to help transition legacy WordPress users towards decoupled architectures over time. By embracing JAMstack while maintaining a familiar admin interface, Adobe enabled customers to improve web performance while unlocking greater agility.

Static Site Performance and Security

As discussed in the "Performance Lag from Server-Side Rendering" section, JAMstack sites built using static site generators provide considerable speed and security benefits compared to monolithic CMS platforms that rely on server-side rendering.

By pre-building pages at deploy-time, static site JAMstack architectures eliminate the computational load associated with assembling pages on each request. This results in significantly faster performance. CDNs can further optimize content delivery.

Additionally, static sites avoid many common security risks like DDoS attacks by preventing excessive processing on servers. There are fewer points of failure and dynamic execution compared to monolithic backends.

These performance and security upsides were covered extensively earlier in our comparison. But in summary, static JAMstack sites inherently provide faster speeds, lower infrastructure costs, and attack resiliency compared to traditional CMS platforms.

When IKEA rebuilt their e-commerce experience using a headless architecture powered by static site generation to improve performance and reduce maintenance efforts, by utilizing these modern techniques and aggressive CDN caching, IKEA improved average load times. The move unlocks IKEA's ability to more easily add emerging capabilities like VR and AR shopping experiences via API integrations going forward.

Conclusion

The limitations of legacy monoliths are now clear, and the benefits of modular JAMstack architectures have been demonstrated through real-world examples. Global leaders like IKEA, Starbucks, and Adobe have already begun unlocking agility, innovation, and better performance by embracing decoupled systems.

The way forward for organizations requires breaking free of past constraints and optimizing for the future. JAMstack provides the flexibility to leverage preferred frameworks like React while integrating with new capabilities as they emerge - from AI to AR.

Developers can finally work unencumbered while delivering the engaging experiences that audiences have come to expect. And integrations via APIs bring once-siloed data together for deeper personalization.

Transitioning from the status quo requires courage and vision. But the future success of digital experiences lies in modular architectures built for speed, creativity and continuous optimization. Now is the time for organizations to take control and unlock new potential. The path forward begins with JAMstack. Will you lead the way?