The importance of right technology choice in web development

You should carefully consider the relevance of a particular technology for your business goals, development costs, and the risks associated with further support when choosing a technology stack. If you want to create a custom e-commerce store for retail, you can choose between WooCommerce and Magento platforms. Magento comes with more built-in features, however development is more expensive. Moreover, due to market peculiarities, there is a risk of failing to find good Magento developers when required (it could become an issue during further maintenance).

If you are thinking of using CMS such as WordPress, Drupal or Magento, I recommend you to avoid using ready themes and page builders. Use only custom themes and clean markup without auto-generated excessive code. Otherwise, you may experience significant performance and maintainability issues. Websites that we delivered on WordPress (https://picupmedia.com/, https://www.ratesandmoney.com/) have excellent load speed mostly because they are custom-made (without the use of ready themes and page builders).

If you consider using back-end frameworks, the most popular are Django, Express, NestJS, Laravel and Spring. The most popular front-end frameworks are Angular, Vue.js, and React library.

As mentioned above, instant site speed is essential. A significant performance indicator is TTFB value (time to the first byte). In CMS-based sites, the only way to avoid delays is the proper use of server-side caching, which caches the entire back-end, including database queries and page response. A proper mechanism for updating the cache should also be implemented based on both schedule and content updates by the admin. With framework-based websites, it is easier to achieve the good TTFB. It is often enough to follow standard coding practices and have NGinx or Apache configured correctly.

Avoid using shared web hosting services (like GoDaddy or Hostgator). Use only reliable cloud servers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Digital Ocean. Of course, you will need the qualified staff to set things up on a clean Linux server, but for sure, you can't let such a detail as web hosting prevent you from fulfilling your business goals. In my other article a guide to choosing and configuring high availability WordPress hosting I've described how people without deep technical skills can set up a reliable WordPress hosting on AWS.

Whenever possible, use cloud infrastructure. For example, if your website is equipped with a search feature with autocomplete functionality, you can integrate AWS Elasticsearch and achieve immediate search results or auto-suggestions on your website. Instead of utilizing your servers' space to store large files, use AWS S3.

Use CDNs (content-delivery networks) such as Cloudflare and Amazon Cloudfront. This method allows your heavy content (e.g. images, videos) to be distributed across multiple servers in different countries, reducing distance latency and allowing your visitors to access this heavy content almost immediately. A Cloudflare Pro plan can also store HTML output in multiple locations, not just heavy content like images and videos.