Imagine a world where every change you make to your website is instantly reflected in a live preview. No more waiting for deployments or risking broken experiences. With a unified development and deployment platform, you can iterate faster, reduce errors, and deliver exceptional user experiences.
Web deployment relies on separate environments, one for making changes and one for deploying updates into a production environment. With 1.09 billion websites on the internet, a platform for efficient deployment is a must to make your projects stand out.
That’s where we come in. We’re a developer’s best friend for web deployment, and we explore that topic in today’s article. Plus, with 5 million developers active on our platform, how could they be wrong?
The challenges of traditional web deployment
Traditional web deployment comes with a myriad of challenges that can bog down the development cycle. Most developers are familiar with these common challenges and often look for ways to overcome them:
- Manual processes: These are “chores” that we solve through automation, letting developers focus on more strategic projects. Manual deployments are prone to bugs and breaks because of human error, while automated systems can replicate things without error, leading to fewer issues.
- Downtime: Bulky, web server-dependent software causes downtime and added maintenance work, demanding developers’ attention. To decrease downtime and improve load speeds, we pioneered the JAMstack architecture, decoupling the frontend and backend for faster, more secure, and scalable web applications. This approach enables independent scaling of frontend and backend components, accelerates development cycles, and enhances overall site performance.
- Infrastructure management: Managing on-premise infrastructure is time-consuming, expensive, and requires constant attention, especially as components age. Managed and cloud-based infrastructure eliminates those infrastructure requirements, freeing developers to focus on UI/UX and other high-impact projects like speed and accessibility.
- Limited scalability: Traditional web deployment requires manual arbitration, which demands developer time and resources, including provisioning servers and managing infrastructure. Our composable and layered approach makes scalability much more accessible to a broader range of projects, including web hosting, web application deployment, and a web platform installer.
Our ability to circumvent these common challenges leads to increased developer productivity and higher-quality projects. Additionally, our tools prevent human error through tedious and repetitive tasks, shortening development cycles.
Netlify: A game-changer for web deployment
Access to the tools to help overcome common web deployment challenges starts by signing up for a free Netlify account. You will get access to a dashboard that enables you to deploy your web page or app in minutes. Our game-changing toolbox also offers valuable features for web deployment you don’t want to miss out on, including:
- Deploy previews: We automatically build every pull request in an identical production environment for painless QA, feedback, and review.
- Instant rollbacks: Ship to production confidently, knowing that you can one-click roll back to previous versions of the site. These rollbacks serve as Instant disaster recovery and robust version control at your fingertips.
- Netlify functions: Serverless functions handle server-like requirements at any scale with no provisioning, scaling, or ops overhead.
- Netlify Forms: Handle user input with a single line of code. HTML accepts submissions, sends notifications and emails, and triggers custom events.
We could spend all day discussing the toolkit available to developers for web deployment. Luckily, we have a separate in-depth guide that allows us to discuss how we support the process holistically. Be sure to bookmark this guide for future reference!
Netlify’s continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD): A closer look
Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) is a software development approach that enables the synchronization of quality web applications between environments in less time and with greater consistency. Let’s look at what these components mean:
- Continuous integration (CI): The process of automatically and frequently integrating project changes into a shared source code repository. This phase involves building, testing, and merging changes.
- Continuous deployment/delivery (CD): The delivery of code changes and the automatic release of updates to the production environment. It makes changes live and active, so changes happen immediately.
With CI/CD, you can also give permissions to non-administrators in non-production environments, allowing you to control the final product. We can act as your web management service, managing CI/CD systems so you don’t have to.
We automatically build website apps, which includes running, testing, and deploying them to a staging environment known as Deploy Preview. From there, you can share, manage, and review feedback before anything arrives in front of the customer’s eyes.
You can also use our platform to integrate with other tooling or templates and automate your entire end-to-end business workflows. This automation of manual processes saves precious time and allows developers to focus on shipping products to customers.
Accelerating development with Netlify’s tools
Earlier, we mentioned integrations, and with us, those integrations extend to popular build tools, including:
- Webpack: A free open-source module bundler for JavaScript. Also transforms front-end assets, including HTML, CSS, and Images.
- Babel: A JavaScript compiler run by a small group of volunteers. It is a toolchain used to convert ECMAScript into backward-compatible versions of JavaScript.
- Gult: Another open-source JavaScript toolkit used as a streaming build system. A Task runner built on Node.js and npm. Used to automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks.
- Grunt: A JavaScript task runner with hundreds of plugins to choose from. These automations shave countless hours off development and deployment times.
Access to these build tools from the Netlify platform centralizes your development. Centralized development means spending less time clicking between platforms, streamlining workflows, and entering deep-work flow states that result in higher productivity.
Netlify’s global CDN: Delivering content faster
A content delivery network, or CDN, is a collection of servers where you can deploy your web apps and pages. This network of servers ensures there’s always one close enough to customers to provide a positive user experience.
A CDN with limited geographic influence will result in slower load times and poor perception, as only IP addresses nearby receive ideal load speeds. We have CDNs scattered across the world to establish a strong connection and excellent experience, regardless of location.
Fast connections and quick load times are essential for the user experience and a vital component of site ranking and SEO. The faster your site loads, the less likely your target audience is to bounce, allowing you to establish higher authority.
Security and reliability with Netlify
Security and privacy are paramount concerns for web users, especially as the financial cost of cybercrime reached a staggering $9.5 trillion in 2024. We take this statistic seriously, recognizing the damage a cyberattack can do to reputations and finances.
We’re committed to security and privacy by helping users understand the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to comply with legal regulations. We also reduce attack surfaces through static and fully-rendered edge nodes.
Enterprise-level organizations can rest easy knowing they’ll remain compliant, thanks to SOC 2 Type 2 audits and annual ISO 27001 certifications. We obtain both the audits and certifications through third-party auditors to ensure confidence in security protocols.
For healthcare organizations handling protected health information (PHI), we offer HIPAA-compliant service options, allowing you to meet industry-specific regulations.
When you use Netlify, you also remain PCI compliant for all SAQ-A requirements for credit card transactions. Plus, we provide free HTTPS certifications for each domain you deploy, and you can enjoy DDoS protection and web application firewalls for constant uptime and reliability.
Netlify’s developer-centric ecosystem
Tools and new features are great, but what does that mean for the developer? How do we support the front-line, day-to-day programmers working to develop and deploy these web applications and sites?
Netlify is a developer-centric ecosystem built with composable architecture in mind. There are countless in-depth guides, the SDK, the command-line interface (CLI), and activity feeds. There are resources and tutorials for virtually any API, framework, artificial intelligence model, and, of course, web deployment tools.
We’re also active on GitHub, sharing our insights with the community and absorbing feedback for future improvements. Download the Netlify GitHub App and have streamlined access!
Enhance your web deployment with Netlify
Web deployment was traditionally manual, time-consuming, and error-prone, resulting in poor user experiences and slow loading times. To avoid these issues, developers and businesses are turning to the Netlify platform.
When you use Netlify for web deployment, you can automatically generate changes and updates, preview and collaborate, and automatically publish updates using CI/CD. You enjoy tools and integrations with powerful tools that streamline workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and focus on high-quality live productions.
Ready to try Netlify? Contact us today to request a demo or sign up for a free account!
