How Jamstack Prepares You For Innovation

How easy is it to update your digital tools and tech stack?

Because for many businesses, changing up tooling and data workflows takes a lot of effort. Between new installations, tedious maintenance tasks, and server management, there are several pieces to manage.

Using an approach like Jamstack makes system updates simple. Embracing a Jamstack ecosystem means you can quickly pivot and be agile when making adjustments to your tech stack. So if your goal is to improve your omnichannel experience, you’ll need a tool that helps you get new experiences up quickly to test and pivot as customer preferences evolve.

Let’s take a closer look at how Jamstack helps prepare brands for innovation and some of its benefits.

Jamstack is more than a technology stack

Jamstack is a development methodology, not a specific solution or a particular piece of software. The method is designed to help you create any functionality your brand might need to evolve and grow.

The Jamstack philosophy is fueled by a community of forward-thinking companies and organizations looking to deliver world-class experiences tailored to their needs. All this is possible by using the three fundamental components that underpin Jamstack: JavaScript, API, and Markup.

With Jamstack, tool integrations have their own cloud-hosted servers. The API-first approach is serverless, as the back-end of each of your tools lies with each provider. As far as languages go, Jamstack doesn’t require you to use a specific one. Rather, you and your team can decide which language suits your needs best.

An ecosystem that evolves with you

At Apply Digital, we use Jamstack because we appreciate the setup’s simple, light, and agile elements. Having the flexibility to choose the specific tech stack for each business is ideal for building a tailor-made platform for our clients.

Using this approach enables your site to load the most important things first, leaving your remaining content on standby. This works through a process called Distributed Persistent Rendering, or DPR. The magic of DPR is that once the additional content is requested, it is stored in your CDN’s cache. So from that moment on, it will be loaded and available for the next user.

Without this feature, your site pages would try to load when your site is active, which would require a few minutes to load any result. For sites with hundreds of thousands of content and pages, the DPR feature is a game-changer.

Innovate to prepare for change

As we saw over the pandemic years, all businesses need to prepare for change. For eCommerce businesses, building your digital assets on a foundation that lets you innovate quickly is key.

For businesses using Jamstack, teams can take advantage of modular tool integrations that align with the MACH philosophy – a set of principles designed to help businesses deliver world-class digital experiences. Jamstack falls into the category of a MACH-guided development approach. One of the pillars of the MACH philosophy is to help businesses become future-proof. To achieve this, businesses must embrace technologies and methods like Jamstack that set the foundations to make this possible.

At Apply Digital, one of the things we often work on with clients is advancing their omnichannel strategy. While this requires standardizing site architecture and design, a great omnichannel strategy can quickly pivot and change as the market or customer demands.

In all of our client projects, preparing for change is a key part of the planning process. Your platform must always be ready to pivot and thrive in uncertainty.

Examples in practice: Coca-Cola Embonor and BUPA Chile

One project that demonstrates the advantages of using an agile approach like Jamstack is the system that our team developed for Coca-Cola Embonor. The business is one of the largest in Chile, with complex needs for a massive amount of content on their site. We built a platform that could load in just a couple of seconds and included dynamic tools to improve user experience. For example, we integrated Algolia, a dynamic search tool, to deliver predictive search returns results as users typed into the search bar.

In addition to dynamic search, a fast loading speed, and user-friendliness, the site integrated all the functionality the company needed to deliver quick and easy retail services.

Another example is the work we did for BUPA’s national subsidiary, a global company in the healthcare sector. The challenge was to develop a better strategy to manage their digital platform and all the clinics in the national network. No business features were needed, but the team wanted a friendly platform that would quickly deliver information on healthcare coverage, a calendar for medical appointments, and news updates.

To tackle this challenge, we needed to unite a host of independent platforms. We used atomic design to standardize the design elements and a headless platform approach to facilitate effective omnichannel management. As a result, we created a streamlined system with a cohesive user experience throughout.

At Apply Digital, we use Jamstack when developing solutions for complex business challenges. If you want to learn more about the Jamstack ecosystem and how it could help your business, please reach out, and someone on our team would be happy to chat.