Jamstack Won’t Replace WordPress

How a Content Delivery Network works and the difference between static vs. dynamic content, and server vs. serverless architectures.

WordPress is a 20 year old Content Management System (CMS) that powers 42.8% of the internet using Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. In that time, a number of technological developments have been created in order to develop websites faster, while also being more performant. Yet WordPress continues to dominate the internet.

Jamstack is an 8 year old “software architecture” that powers 1.2% of the internet using JavaScript, APIs, and Markdown. The architecture claims to make the web faster, more secure, and easier to scale. It also advertises how it builds upon tools developers love, which results in “maximum productivity”.

So why hasn’t Jamstack replaced WordPress yet?

The idea behind Jamstack is that you serve your website from a Content Delivery Network which pulls the website’s files from a Serverless Architecture. But what does that mean?

What is a Content Delivery Network?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a service — provided by companies such as Cloudflare and Fastly — that speeds up the time it takes for a website user to load a website page (web page). This service is implemented by hosting a number of website servers (web servers) around the world, then serving website content (files) from the server that is closest to the requesting user. Lowering the distance from the server to the user’s client reduces network latency, so the user receives data faster.

In other words, a CDN represents a cache located “on the edge” of a network.

What is a file? A file is a virtual representation of paper that stores bits (1s and 0s). On the other hand, content is a human construct used to represent media (which files can contain). However, it’s also common for people to refer to file contents as the data within any file. Understanding the difference between a file and content is important.

A “PNG Image” is a file with a “.png” extension which contains image content.