Finding Solutions - Tech Troubles

Barbara Buckley / Nov 15, 2022

Tech troubleshooting - wow, where to start?! Following on from the first in our "Finding Solutions" blog series, this time we look at common challenges that clients face when it comes to the more technical aspects of their digital presence.

Regardless of which CMS you choose, your website needs to adapt to your evolving business needs, but how and when to future-proof a website can seem a daunting task.

Although the list of technical pain points and challenges can often seem endless, we have identified three key areas which are always at the core of clients' concerns or struggles.

SPEED

Our Website is too slow, we need a fast-responding digital user experience

There is always a need for speed! This is perhaps the No.1 pain point for anyone using or owning a website. There’s no sugar-coating it - slow page loading is frustrating and also has a negative impact on your business.

One part of the solution to this challenge is React. What is React? In a nutshell, it’s an open-source JavaScript Library. We discuss more technical details in a recent blog, but for decision-makers, the really important question is always how is it a solution to slow loading speed?

React is built in a way that is super performant. Overall, It has lots of snazzy features and an array of benefits in other aspects of web development. When it comes to dealing with performance issues, React allows updates to pages and elements to be super fast, but also scalable.

The second part of the solution is Gatsby - an open-source static site generator. In a recent project, the combined impact of React and Gatsby resulted in page loads that were twice as fast after relaunching the website.

SECURITY

"How can I set up an additional layer of security on my website to further minimise the vulnerability of my CMS?"

The security of your business's website is crucial, understandably, this can be a major area of concern. Protecting sensitive data, software, and hardware from risks is vital for any business, but again, technical knowledge is often required to identify, understand and deal with vulnerabilities.

Cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery are two big risks that can raise their ugly heads. Essentially, both risks mean that external parties are interfering with your website’s content in a, potentially, malicious way. It goes without saying, this is not acceptable.

Gatsby offers features that deal with these pain points and present numerous security advantages. No website is unhackable, but the set-up of Gatsby provides more peace of mind by giving you more time to first identify and act when a risk does appear.

For a deeper dive into the structure and additional benefits of Gatsby from a security perspective, read our recent blog, by Eli Stone, Amazee Labs Drupal Developer.

SCALABILITY

We are a fast-growing company and need a highly scalable CMS

What your website requires today, is not necessarily what it will need in a year's time or even further into the future. Businesses inevitably evolve and what you want to avoid is a website created with only today’s needs in mind. Arguably, every consultancy should advise on building a site that grows with your business, but ‘how’ this should be done is the big question!

Even though more and more clients are opting for a decoupled web application, the business case for moving to this less traditional setup needs to be strong to convince the decision-makers. Still, it can offer an amazing solution for managing complex websites and offering solutions to scalability.

A decoupled web application offers flexibility when it comes to adapting your backend to your business needs. You are not as constricted because the frontend doesn’t care where the data comes from, it just takes the data that is made available to it.

In addition, if you need to rapidly scale your content a decoupled frontend supports this. Your business may need to add an additional frontend, for example, a touchscreen, or maybe you already have many frontends that need to retrieve data from one centralised backend. With a decoupled setup, this complexity is handled without negatively impacting performance.

For a summary of more benefits of going decoupled, check out our recent blog and examples of recent projects.

Even though there are similar technical challenges that many clients face, we also appreciate that each business is unique in its goals, visions, and needs.

If you are interested in finding out more or are currently facing tech troubles, we are always happy to chat, so either get in touch or reach out to our Client Engagement Manager, Ricardo Luchsinger, and arrange a meeting to find out more about partnering with us.