As a website owner, you’re probably happy knowing that you have WordPress as a reliable CMS for your needs.
What if there was an alternative that could boost your website’s performance? For those always looking to optimize their site, JAMstack CMS is an option you should consider.
What Is JAMstack CMS?
JAMstack is a development architecture that uses JavaScript, APIs, and Markup; hence the JAM part. Rather than a traditional CMS, JAMstack breaks up code, infrastructure, and content, placing the burden of putting it all together on the client-side.
This is akin to sending someone the ingredients and a recipe so that the dish is created in their kitchen. In this analogy, WordPress would be like food delivery. In essence, a traditional CMS puts everything together and serves it up for the client.
Why Migrate From WordPress?
Knowing the difference between the two architectures, why would you want to migrate from WordPress to JAMstack? Are there any powerful benefits that you will offer significant gains to your site?
Scaling Up Is Easier
As experts from Contentful put it:
The static nature of a JAMstack app makes scaling easy and causes little to no dev-ops overhead. The JAMstack approach can also improve your app’s security posture since static sites generally have a small attack vector.
JAMstack Is Faster Than WordPress
By serving generated HTML instead of having to render documents live on the server, JAMstack CMS makes your website faster. This can have a significant positive impact on your rankings in search engines.
3 Strategies for Migrating from WordPress
Before delving into how to migrate from WordPress to JAMstack, it’s important to understand potential roadblocks along the way. Plugins, shortcodes, and other WordPress elements may not translate easily from one architecture to the other.
Large websites that employ traditional CMS architecture may need some troubleshooting before they can operate in the JAMstack framework. However, the benefits far outweigh any effort you will need to exert in making the switch. Let’s look at the 3 strategies for moving forward with your migration.
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Use WordPress REST API
WordPress allows you to access all of your website’s content using a REST API. This allows WordPress to operate as a headless CMS. A headless CMS is a content management system whose back-end only nature allows the API to serve up the content for display on any device.
Keep in mind that you can continue to use your WordPress backend for managing your website. This gives you the best of both worlds: lightning-fast speed and intuitive management.
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Export Your Content to Flat Files
This comes in handy when you’re doing a one-time export of the content instead of continuing to use WordPress for back-end management.
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Import Your Content to a Headless CMS
Importing your website’s content into a headless CMS allows you to enjoy the best of both worlds. You get to keep the WordPress backend while getting rid of the need to host a WordPress instance in order to maintain the backend. To implement this strategy, you’ll have to find an import tool that suits the headless CMS of your choice.
Take Advantage of JAMStak CMS
JAMstack is for website owners that can benefit from blazing loading speed and improved user experience. Choose whether or not you want to use WordPress for your backend and implement this game-changing architecture for your website.
