Website builders like WordPress can be great for some businesses as they help to save development costs. With that said, investing in a fully custom-built Jamstack site can pay off many times over, for a number of reasons:
Blazing fast page loading times
Even a well optimised WordPress site can often take 3-4 seconds to load. We build custom websites that load fully in around 1 second, which makes a huge difference for visitors.
Many studies (you can see some data here) have shown that for every extra second a page takes to load, a large percentage of visitors will simply give up and leave.
Page load speed is also a factor for ranking in Google search results!
Easy content management, without developer help
We use modern headless CMSs like Prismic that make it super easy for you to create new, or edit existing content on your website. The CMS will be configured to only show you what you need to see - making it much simpler to use than a one-size-fits-all dashboard like you might see with a WordPress website.
Improved security
WordPress websites need to be constantly updated and maintained to stay on top of security issues. As WordPress is so popular, hackers can wait for a known security issue in a popular theme or plugin and then use that to infiltrate many websites.
The custom websites we build are generally what's known as "static" sites, which means there's no server that can be attacked to take down the website.
Little (if any) maintenance required
The code we write will continue to work long into the future, and there are no plugins to keep updated.
This way, you can invest your time and money into something that gets you a return, rather than just paying to keep your website working how it should!
A/B Testing Without Performance Issues
A/B testing is an essential tool for improving the conversion rate of your website. It does usually come with the downside of hurting performance, but that can be avoided using Netlify's split testing tool on Jamstack. A/B testing tools like Google Optimize update the content of the page with JavaScript, meaning the original page is loaded first and then updated after the fact. This increases the time it takes for the page to be fully loaded, and can also mean visitors will see a flash of the original page, before seeing the new variant.
That UX disaster can be completely avoided on Jamstack sites, where page variations can be handled at the server side, before the page is even loaded.
Full design control
While website builders have improved a lot and now offer a lot of flexibility, they will never give you access to the level of control that coding will.
With custom code, the website designer can be given full freedom to create their best design, without being restricted by the capabilities of a page builder.
