Our great sponsors
-
eleventy 🕚⚡️
A simpler site generator. Transforms a directory of templates (of varying types) into HTML.
-
-
SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
-
-
And so I turned to Eleventy — a static site generator built with JavaScript — that ships no JavaScript to the browser by default. It's more of a build tool than a front end framework, and gives developers total control of the files and assets that are built and served to a browser from a CDN. The great thing about this migration was that I could continue to use Contentful to manage my content.
I built my first simple blog site in 2020 using Svelte and Sapper. The blog posts were powered by markdown files stored in the repository, and it was a great starting point.
In January 2021, I joined Contentful as a Developer Advocate, and my focus was helping developers use Contentful with popular front end JavaScript frameworks. In March 2021, I rebuilt my blog site using Contentful and Next.js — a React front-end framework that combines static pre-rendering, server-side rendering and in-built serverless functions.
Performance was compared between the Next.js site and Eleventy site using three free tools: Google Lighthouse, web.dev/measure and Web Page Test. Lighthouse tests were run in Brave Browser dev tools, Web Page Test runs were conducted via the web app using the London, UK - EC2 server, and web.dev tests were conducted in the browser. Given that I advocate for mobile-first development — and that's where performance is most likely to be impacted given the unpredictable speed of mobile data — all tests were conducted in an emulated mobile environment using a medium 3G network speed, on iPhone 6/7/8.