Smashing Magazine, the largest online publication for web developers and designers, is now live on Netlify. With this move comes a massive renovation of the site’s architecture and significant improvements to speed, scalability, and security for more than 2.5 million visitors every month.
Earlier this year we shared that the Smashing Magazine team decided to migrate off of WordPress because of numerous issues with scaling, caching, and general usability. Because the previous site was a highly-customized combination of WordPress, Kirby, Rails, and Shopify, the move would need to include solutions for a decoupled CMS, comments engine, eCommerce platform, and member login.
Smashing Magazine chose to take advantage of a planned site redesign to build their site using the JAMstack, a methodology for frontend web development driven entirely by Javascript, reusable APIs, and markup. In the process, they’ve completely redefined what it means to have a static site — delivering eCommerce functionality, user management, commenting, and more through Netlify and its open source projects.
Now, Smashingmagazine.com is the most advanced JAMstack site we’ve ever seen. The entire project is built on a mix of static content served directly from Netlify’s purpose-built global CDN and microservices that support anything that needs a data transaction, like registering a membership or leaving a comment. That means the site doesn’t need to run server-side code — and it’s now 10 times faster. Yep. Smashingmagazine.com is now 10 times faster.
Oh, and there’s one more super awesome thing about this relaunch: Smashing Magazine is now offering memberships with the intention of going completely ad-free. Though advertising revenue can be of the utmost importance for online publishers, internet advertising is distracting, painfully slow, and often injected with malicious scripts. Hats off to our friends at Smashing for supporting a faster, safer, and overall healthier web!
Feeling inspired? Whether you simply want to speed up your site or you want to go full tilt on the JAMstack, we’re here to help. Get started with a tutorial, or give us a shout on Twitter, Gitter, or through Support.
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