Why should you give up WordPress? Reason no. 2: Reliability
Why should you give up WordPress and build your website according to the Jamstack architecture? Reason no. 2: Reliability
How to easily disable the client's website?
One morning I received a call from my client saying his website was down. Of course, nothing would be terrible about it, but I was just on my way to a full-day training outside the office. I couldn't fix anything from the phone! You can only imagine how bad the customer's CEO was.
A bug in the plugin caused the crash after the automatic update. There was a conflict between the plugin code and the WordPress theme code. As a result, the layout was utterly messed up and lasted all day until the plugin authors released the patch in the evening. But, you might ask, who the hell is using auto-updates in WordPress? A severe web admin should back up files and databases first. Only then can he update each plugin in turn.
Such an ideal workflow is not a big deal when managing a single website. However, when you work five pages, this process takes you at least one day each month. Well, I chose to make my job easier and had to pay for it.
Is WordPress reliable?
Let us be clear – I think WP is a great system. Hundreds of developers are behind it, so it is well-tested and highly stable. Using WP, you can build any website: from a simple blog, through a social network, to an extensive corporate website with an online store. All thanks to thousands of available plugins extending basic features.
Unfortunately, plugins are the biggest problem with this CMS. You need to install an external plugin for every – even the most minor additional feature. Support for another language? WPML. Google Map? WP Go Maps. E-commerce? WooCommerce. Contact form? Contact Form 7. Images optimisation? Smush. Performance? WP Rocket. Want edit <head> section? Another plugin with a name that I don't remember.
These plugins are checked for compatibility but only with the WP core. So no one can guarantee that each plug will be compatible with the others. For example, look at the chart below.
If you have installed only one plugin, the risk of its failure is relatively low. If you have installed two plugins, the risk of error is already three times higher. There can be a conflict between:
If you use five external plugins, the risk of errors is fifteen times higher than the base value! So the question is not IF your website will go down. The question is WHEN it will happen.
Is Jamstack reliable?
As you may have guessed, I will now try to prove that Jamstack is much more reliable than a monolith CMS like WP.
Decoupled building and sharing to public
The main difference between Jamstack and other web stacks is the pre-building process. Pre-building is a bit like compiling code where you get executables. Only these files are available to users. You need to recompile them to make any visible changes.
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Thanks to this, no change in the production version will be published without your knowledge. You will catch a possible error at the pre-building stage before they become visible to users. More about Jamstack workflow in the post: link
Decoupled frontend and backend
A typical Jamstack page consists of static pages linked to an external API. You can compare these APIs to WP plugins. The most crucial advantage of API over plugins is that their core code runs outside your server. It means that even in the event of a failure, there is no risk that the website will be inaccessible to users. You have all the crucial layouts and data encoded in static HTML.
Easy access to the low layer of the website
When building a website according to the Jamstack approach, you must use pure HTML, CSS and JS. As a result, the design process is longer and more complex, but you don't have to rely on external plugins to implement simple additional features. Look at the examples:
You can say that in WordPress, you also have access to the lowest layer of the website. True, but it requires knowledge of PHP. In my opinion, it is much easier and faster to manipulate the HTML and CSS code.
Easy recovery
With the Jamstack approach, you can minimise the risk of failure, but you won't eliminate it. However, restoring the site is much easier.
Jamstack is git-centric. You store all your data in a remote repository. Then you sync your live webpage with this repo. All changes are visible right after the git push command is executed. Thanks to this, you can go back to any commit from the past at any time with one click – no more cyclic backups of your database and entire directories from your FTP account. If you use git correctly, you have already made all the necessary copies during the design process.
Summary
Working with pure HTML, CSS, and JS is more complicated than using popular WP page builders. However, the authors of these standards ensure that the subsequent versions of these languages are fully compatible with the old editions. After building a website in the Jamstack technology and loading it on the server, you can forget about it for years, and it will work anyway.
If this feature doesn't impress you, try skipping the subsequent few WP core updates. Then go back to this post and write in the comment how long it took you to bring the website back to life :)
[2022-10-21 09:16]