Etnocafe.pl Modern, performant
and easy-to-navigate
website based on Jamstack

About

Let’s meet Etno Cafe

Etno Cafe is a Polish coffee concept that includes a coffee shop chain, coffee roastery and cold brewery. The brand was created 9 years ago in Wroclaw, and now it is one of the most recognizable coffee brands in the country, and soon to establish itself abroad as well. Etno Cafe puts great attention to detail into their daily work, ensuring the highest possible standards.

This is the source of their undeniable success. The roastery was launched in 2013 and the first coffee shop was opened in 2015 – now there are 20 of them in 7 different Polish cities. The third and final part of the Etno business, the coffee brewery, was launched in 2016 and now the Cold Brew Coffee is one of the brand's favorite products, especially during the summer.

Goal

What the client wanted to achieve

For Etno Cafe’s owners, their website is a vital way of expanding brand awareness and reaching out to new customers. As such, they wanted it to be performant, stable, secure and in line with the newly established look and feel of the brand.

Information transparency, the ability to easily edit website content, and an increase in users’ interactions were also some of the main goals the client wanted to achieve. This was mostly due to the wide range of the offer, the seasonal menus in each of the coffee shops, and an overall willingness to keep customers informed.

The new website was designed mostly for marketing and image-building purposes. Nevertheless, the growth in the number of visitors and B2B leads was also more than welcome, so we needed to develop some integrations with email marketing and lead generation tools to accommodate these additional benefits.

Summing up, Etno Cafe wanted their new website to be stable, secure and performant, but also visually appealing and memorable.

Challenge

What we had to face

Etno Cafe’s previous website was built on WordPress in 2014, so it was not only out-of-date but also very vulnerable and prone to cyber attacks. It could cause a lot of troubles, such as SEO issues and data leakages. The main challenge was to find a proper alternative based on the client’s needs and future plans.

The new website was supposed to be stable, easy-to-manage (even by non-technical members of the organization), editable, user-friendly, fresh and secure.

That’s why, after in-depth analysis, we’ve decided to go with the Jamstack approach.

Jamstack websites are known to be fundamentally more secure than WordPress because they don’t rely on a public database. What’s more, they don’t expose scripting and, if you serve them from a CDN, they don’t have a single point of failure.

Solution

How we chose the stack and strategy

Etno Cafe gave us a free hand when it comes to choosing the technology. After an in-depth analysis, we were sure the Jamstack approach is the best possible choice. A highly performant website influences the user experience, increases user retention rates, causes a bump in SEO rankings and helps to achieve marketing goals.

Knowing that the visual and textual side of the project is as important to the client as the technological reliability – we engaged several specialists who worked together to achieve these goals.

The starting point of the project was to develop the content that would convey the brand's philosophy and be relevant to the target groups. The next step was UX/UI - and graphic design – all of which had to be in line with the new look and feel of the brand.

Having the content and graphic designs, we could go on to implementation. The choice of appropriate technologies and tools was not without significance.

We chose Sanity (a headless CMS solution) because it is highly flexible and can be configured precisely to Etno Cafe’s needs. A headless CMS allows us to deliver content wherever we need — not only to a templated site, but even to many receivers at the same time, like e-stores or mobile apps. Sanity meets one of the key goals – content changes and edits can be made without any developer support, so Etno Cafe’s team members can easily update the menu, special offers and new coffee shop locations.

If you want to learn more about Sanity and other headless CMS solutions – check one of the articles on our blog.

Read on

To complete the Jamstack approach, we chose Netlify and Gatsby. Netlify is a content delivery network that ensures the website will be super-fast using global distribution and automated pre-rendering. It lets client create unlimited branches of the website. It has both built-in DNS management & SSL certificates, which results in less complexity when launching the website, and it’s all hosted in one place.

Gatsby JS is the Static Site Generator (you can think of it as a website publisher) – it takes the input files needed and both converts and publishes them into a web-friendly format.

Gatsby (SSG):
React & GraphQL
Sanity
(Headless CMS)
Netlify
(CND)

1

Content
Creator
2

Graphic
Designer
3

UX/UI
Specialist
4

Jamstack
Developer
5

Project
Manager

Results

What we accomplished

Finally, Etno Cafe’s new website is fast, safe, easy-to-navigate, user-friendly and well-performing, as well as textually and graphically concordant with brand image.

General score
(according to Page Speed Insights)

73 91
First Contentful Paint (FCP)

1.7 s 0.6 s
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

4.2 s 0.6 s
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

1.39 0.014
Speed Index

1.9 s 1.2 s

We have achieved all set objectives. The information architecture is transparent and navigation is easy, so customers can find all the information they need without difficulty. What’s more, the website is vibrant, visually appealing and memorable. It undoubtedly stands out from the competition.

We believe that a secure and performant website will provide strong support for Etno Cafe in developing their brand and conquering new markets.

Etno Cafe in numbers (according to Lighthouse Report)

92
Performance
92
Accessibility
93
Best Practises
100
Search Engine Optimisation

Testimonial

What our client says

This was not a typical project, especially from the visual perspective.

Zuzanna Zapolska

Head of Digital & E-Commerce at Etno Cafe

Naturaily impressed us with their flexibility and determination to succeed, overcoming each challenge that presented itself. Our needs have always come first. They managed to fulfill our vision with creativity and a problem-solving approach. It was a truly honest cooperation, full of patience and understanding. The team was always available, ready to help and answered all of our questions. I strongly recommend working with Naturaily.