Why are developers choosing Jamstack more often?

The popularity of Jamstack is systematically growing not only among business owners or marketers but also among developers. According to HTTP Archive, in 2021 the number of Jamstack websites increased 1.5 times compared to 2020 (an increase by 50% in just one year).

Another interesting statistic is that, in accordance with the Jamstack Community Survey 2021, the percentage of Jamstack developers with less than one year of experience more than tripled when we compare 2021 with 2020. In other words, the number of developers who decided to start learning Jamstack is growing significantly.

Read on to find out more about data backing this assumption and why web developers are deciding to switch to Jamstack from other approaches and why this present trend is likely to continue in the near future.

What will you learn from this blog post?

• A brief introduction to Jamstack

• Why is Jamstack getting more popular?

• Is Jamstack the next big thing for developers?

• Why do developers choose Jamstack?

• Is Jamstack better than WordPress, according to developers?

At the beginning, we will talk a bit about Jamstack basics for those who haven't come across this term. If you already know what it is, you can move straight to the section called ‘Why is Jamstack getting more popular?’.

A brief introduction to Jamstack

Jamstack, a modern web development approach, is rapidly gaining traction. Originally coined by Netlify's CEO in 2015, it emphasizes building static websites (sometimes with headless CMS).

Jamstack offers a modern solution to web development with benefits like speed, security, and scalability. Its growing popularity is driven by rising adoption, a flourishing developer community, and significant industry investment.

Here's what's driving its rise:

• Growing Adoption - The percentage of websites built with Jamstack is steadily increasing, reflecting developer interest.

• New Developers Entering the Field - The Jamstack developer community is expanding, with a significant influx of new talent.

• Increased Investment - Major funding rounds for Jamstack-related companies like Netlify and Vercel signal strong industry confidence.

• Focus on Decoupling - Jamstack, or "headless" development, decouples front-ends from back-ends, simplifying development and improving maintainability.

Jamstack itself isn’t a framework. However, developers use frameworks and static site generators for building Jamstack sites.

Jamstack is used to build fast, performant, secure, SEO-friendly, and reliable static sites, web apps, and online stores.

For a deeper dive into the technical aspects of Jamstack and its functionalities, explore our comprehensive guide on what is Jamstack.

Some indicators of Jamstack’s growing popularity

It’s time to give you some proof that Jamstack’s popularity is growing lately and that this trend is likely to continue. Check out these stats and numbers:

• More and more junior developers are deciding to learn Jamstack – 13% of developers had less than one year of Jamstack experience in 2021 compared to 4% the year before.

• More and more developers outside the United States and Europe are learning Jamstack – with percentage increases inversely proportional to the years of experience. For example, in the category of developers with 15+ years of experience, just 15% of them come outside of the US and Europe, while in the category of developers with least experience, that number triples to 48%.

• Only 20% of eCommerce and tech companies state that they haven’t got enough Jamstack knowledge.

• 75% of the same companies state that they have enough resources to work with Jamstack.

• 30% of surveyed companies already use this approach.

• 48% of them want to start using Jamstack in the next year.

One main conclusion is that big companies have been preparing to start using Jamstack or Headless CMS for more than one year now and it’s likely that the others will follow. More than that, these big companies will set new standards as they are ready to invest big bucks in this promising and already-established approach to web development.

If you want to find out more about trends and developers’ preferences, you can check:

• Jamstack Community Survey 2021

• The Web Almanac by HTTP Archive

• Headless, microservices and the future of commerce platforms (PDF)

• Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2021

• The State of Frontend by The Software House

Is Jamstack the next big thing for developers?

While Jamstack’s popularity is growing – and so is its usage – it also makes you wonder: is it really the next big thing in web development and not just a passing trend like many before?

Well, the recent events that took place in November 2021 in the Jamstack world may be perceived as the affirmative answer to this question.

There is more and more money coming to Jamstack

First of all, Vercel – the company behind Next.js, one of the most popular Jamstack static site generators – raised $150 million to build the end-to-end development platform, but not only that. They will use this money to:

• Support open-source projects – this includes the aforementioned Next.js but also Nuxt, webpack, Babel, and Svelte, another open-source framework that’s gaining traction recently.

• Make the Web Edge-first – Vercel will use money to develop Edge Functions that they released in September 2021, including Geolocation, A/B testing, and Basic Auth. This is connected with Vercel's ambition to popularize the edge-first web. Edge-first means that computation is physically moved away from data centers - to make them more effective in terms of response times. You can read more about the Edge Network on Vercel’s website.

• Build the end-to-end development platform – they want to create an infrastructure that will allow for seamless integrations with any tool in a single workflow. Through that, they want to provide the best developer experience possible and a space where all development happens – from idea through analytics to production.

You also need to know this is just one of a couple of funding rounds for Vercel. Due to prior investments, the company is valued at $2.5 billion. All these plans are aimed at achieving one main goal – the centralization of web development and closing it in one comfortable system for an easier deployment. And Jamstack serves as a basic approach here. This can lead to a modern web revolution – and can change the way we take when building websites.

What does it have to do with Jamstack? While Vercel will invest raised capital in their products, it in fact means that they will invest in the further development of Jamstack. Foremost, we should expect the enhanced capabilities of Next.js that is already loved by developers and a first choice for many.

The usage of APIs is becoming more frequent

Second of all, Netlify raised an additional $105 million for further development of Jamstack-related solutions. Analogical to Vercel’s, this has been only one of their recent funding rounds.

As Matt Billmann – the CEO of Netlify – said, one of their goals is to help developers with managing all dependencies between various elements like APIs. To do that, they acquired OneGraph, a company that developed a solution based on GraphQL that helps with connecting different APIs on the back-end layer.

In other words, they want to decrease the complexity of connecting and managing various APIs and services and make Jamstack development feel like a unified application experience.

Additionally, Netlify set up a $10 million Jamstack innovation fund as an encouragement and support of various initiatives related to Jamstack. They also want to invest another $1 million in open-source tooling.

Big companies are already using Jamstack

Another argument in favor of Jamstack being the next big thing for developers is that it is being used in more and more complex projects – websites and eCommerce platforms – visited by millions of visitors. This has become possible thanks to the fast-paced development of Jamstack features and its enhanced possibilities. Furthermore, funds raised by Jamstack-related companies like Netlify, Vercel, Fabric or commercetools herald further, continued growth.

Big brands also keep a close watch on the development of the new technologies and some of them have already decided to use Jamstack. Among them are:

• Bitcoin.com

• Daniel Wellington

• IBM

• Louis Vuitton

• Marvel

• National Geographic

• Nike

Taking into account the above facts, it’s clear that Jamstack is growing and will be growing in the future. And this is one of the reasons why developers tend to choose it lately: a clear direction the web development-related market is heading towards.

The market situation motivates some developers to consider switching to this approach and its related technologies, and this is the first group of arguments. There is another one: arguments on the side of usage and developers’ hands-on experience.

Why do developers choose Jamstack?

We asked this question to our developers and, well, there are many reasons. Among them are:

• The urge to work with the newest technologies

• Great developer experience

• Flexibility

• Easy maintenance

• Time savings

• Vibrant community

• Quick and structured way of learning

• Satisfaction coming from better outcomes of the project

They want to work with the newest technologies

Web developers, who are passionate about what they do, always look for technological innovations because they want to learn and improve every single day. For some of them, sitting on the sidelines is not enough, so they try to improve the development process and that’s why Jamstack is being seen as a thing to take a look at more frequently.

They want to have a perfect development experience

Choosing Headless means that developers can use their favorite tools and are not limited to particular, old-fashioned solutions that are slow, heavy and ineffective. Jamstack is, among others, about boosting the development process so developers can deliver faster results and focus on what truly matters.

They want to have flexibility regarding the technologies used

When making a decision about tech stack, web developers usually look at the overall developer experience offered by a particular solution. These decisions may include choosing static site generators, programming languages, frameworks, or other technological tools.

Static-dynamic architecture means that Jamstack offers a lot of flexibility regarding things like hosting or tools to use. In the first case, you can use whatever hosting you want, while in the latter case, as Jamstack projects are based on microservices architecture, you can use another tool for processing payments, another for making the website multilingual, another for searching, and so on. In the end, Jamstack gives developers a wider choice of tools to achieve their goals. They just have more ways to get there.

They want to have easy website maintenance

Jamstack sites don’t need to be taken care of 24/7. Because of that, developers can spend their time elsewhere, instead of fixing small problems or wondering why the website went down. Another plus is that developers are maintaining their own code, their own architecture, and updating versions of different libraries is much easier. They are not dependent on the back-end layer when working on the front-end.

They want to do more in less time

Jamstack offers some features that boost the development process, which means time savings for developers. These features include:

• Reusability – pre-made components and features that can be used over and over again.

• Headless integration – developers can focus on the front-end layer without the fear of breaching a back-end, because they can connect it to the existing content management system.

• Seamless integration with APIs – thanks to APIs and pre-made integrations, developers can just connect the Jamstack website to API to take care of features like payments instead of coding it from scratch.

They want to be a part of a growing web community

Jamstack is becoming increasingly popular and its community similarly grows, too. There are a lot of tutorials, tools with constantly updated repositories, and technical forums where developers can ask for help. Such growing interest in Jamstack among developers means more questions, broader space for discussion and more intensive knowledge exchange. Headless approach is constantly evolving, with new languages, frameworks, and CMS appearing.

For example, right now there are almost 100 different headless CMS’es to choose from! The community is rising - there is much to talk about.

Examples of relevant Headless/Jamstack communities and resources:

• The Sanity Exchange

• Storyblok Community

• Vercel Guides

• Jamstack global community

• Gatsby community

• Contentful Developer Portal

• Strapi Community

They want to learn new skills efficiently

From the perspective of learning, Jamstack is great because developers can focus solely on the “separated” front-end layer without worrying much about the back-end. It’s a whole new way of acquiring proficiency that’s based on mastering one aspect of skills and knowledge, then another, and another. Moreover, acquired knowledge can be transferred from one project to the next.

The structure of knowledge acquisition itself is "block-wise"; i.e., you may learn one element first and be able to perform a fairly specific action at that stage, then you learn another element, and so on. This makes it easier for junior developers to start their web development career and improve their skills and competences quickly.

They want to feel satisfied with the outcomes of their work

Good developers want to have the feeling of a job well done. And while requirements regarding websites, online stores and applications are constantly changing and becoming more demanding and sophisticated, Jamstack helps developers achieve them. Jamstack websites are increasingly lighter, faster, more performant and SEO-efficient, and it’s something developers can be proud of and satisfied with.

Additionally, the satisfaction also comes with more and more possibilities that Jamstack brings to the table – frameworks, APIs, CMS and other tools can be combined together in more ways and this allows for the use of Jamstack in more complex and demanding projects.

Is Jamstack better than WordPress, according to developers?

As reported by Kinsta, WordPress powers 40% of all websites. Its popularity and ease of use are one of the reasons why people keep choosing it but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t consider Jamstack as an alternative. In fact, Jamstack has to offer some advantages over the most popular CMS in the world.

These advantages include:

• Faster page load speed – Jamstack websites are pre-rendered so they are delivered faster to the visitor than those built on WP. Jamstack sites also take advantage of a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which basically improves delivery performance. This is possible because, thanks to the CDN, requests are being serviced from the servers closest to the visitor making the request.

• No tech stack limitations – developers can choose the tools they already know and love for both front-end and back-end layers because these layers are separated. It boosts the development process and makes it enjoyable.

• SEO-efficiency – Google loves static sites, which are also performant, fast, and secure. Headless offers all that and it makes websites based on it easier to crawl and rank.

• Better security – as there is no direct connection to the database, it makes Jamstack websites highly secure. It’s of much importance because security breaches and malware attacks can erase a website’s content or even get a website blacklisted by Google.

• A lower number of errors and issues – WordPress users experience many issues daily for different reasons, such as plugin incompatibility after an update or some random errors, while Headless is a perfect way to build a fully functional and compatible website.

• Easier maintenance – contrary to WordPress, Jamstack doesn’t require that much attention from developers as it’s rock solid when coded properly. So instead of fixing different issues caused by WordPress, Jamstack developers can focus on something else.

Conclusion

Developers – including those working in Naturaily – want to work with Jamstack due to the many benefits it brings to the table. It’s a perfect mix of wide possibilities that help achieve business and marketing goals, exceptional developer experience, long-term professional development and… fun.

If you want to cooperate with people who are passionate about their work, we might actually be a good fit! Reach out to us by filling out a contact form or by clicking on a picture below.

Or, maybe, you’re interested in developing yourself within the Jamstack approach. Check our Careers tab – we are hiring skillful developers who want to work with modern web development architecture based on Jamstack!