We develop Jamstack websites and performance marketing for municipal utilities and municipalities as well as small and medium-sized companies and combine them to create a lasting sense of achievement.

A powerful combination

Jamstack Websites + Performance Marketing

<h1 class='heading__h1'>Flanke 7 GmbH</h1>

Do you like our projects?

Blog

All posts

Projects

All projects

The fastest websites in the industry: We develop extremely fast jamstack websites ✅ + performance marketing ✅ for lasting success.

Flanke 7 GmbH: Jamstack Websites + Performance Marketing

The Jamstack is a new method for creating websites, which convinces especially with its fast loading time and its ingenious search engine optimization. In the following we will explain the terms around the Jamstack as well as search engine optimization and show you the advantages for companies that want to realize their website with Jamstack.

Why is Jamstack the future of web development?

Jamstack is a modern architecture for website and web application development. Jamstack is based on the idea that website building blocks consist of small, reusable modules that are assembled into a complete website. The Jamstack offers a number of benefits for search engine optimization (SEO). For one, the Jamstack is very fast. Websites created with the Jamstack usually load blazing fast, which is beneficial for SEO. Secondly, the Jamstack is very flexible to use. Since websites built with Jamstack are modular, search engines can easily understand what is on a website. The Jamstack is also very scalable. When a website is built with Jamstack, it can easily run on multiple servers at the same time. This is ideal for businesses that need to update or expand their website frequently. All of these benefits make Jamstack an ideal choice for businesses that want to improve their online presence and optimize their search results.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO is short for search engine optimization. It's about making a website so that it can be easily found by search engines like Google. To do this, you must first carefully research the content of your website and choose the right keywords. You also need to make sure that your website offers a very good user experience and provides relevant content. The Jamstack is ideal for SEO, as with it offers fast loading times, high security and secure maintainability. Moreover, Jamstack websites can be optimally indexed with search engines.

What are the advantages of Jamstack for businesses?

The first and most obvious SEO benefit of Jamstack is the fact that there is no server that could be hacked. This means that the website is much more secure than traditional websites that are hosted on a server. In addition, the Jamstack is extremely fast. By avoiding servers and databases, the loading time of a website is greatly improved. This is another great advantage for SEO, as search engines prefer fast websites. Finally, the Jamstack is very scalable. Since there is no server to rely on, websites can scale as the business requires. If more traffic comes to a website, the Jamstack can easily handle it. This is especially important for businesses with high traffic spikes (e.g. e-commerce websites). Overall, the Jamstack offers many benefits for businesses, especially in terms of SEO. If you need a fast, secure, and scalable website for your business, the Jamstack should be considered.

Conclusion for a successful SEO strategy with Jamstack

The advantages of using Jamstack for a successful SEO strategy are undeniable. By separating the front-end from the back-end, websites can load faster, which in turn improves the user experience and increases the conversion rate. Jamstack also increases security, as attackers cannot access the backend. This lays an important foundation for an optimal SEO strategy.

We as an agency have specialized in Jamstack websites and offer comprehensive services to create these high-performance websites and optimize them for search engines. We know what it takes to create a successful search engine strategy combined with performance marketing.

The Benefits of a Jamstack Website for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is the first in a series of case studies on the Jamstack websites we develop. We developed a website for Taxi Bastone from Schorndorf that is fast, reliable, barrier-free and bilingual.

Screenshot-from-2021-08-31-15-51-16.avif

Taxi Bastone achieves a very good score in all areas of Lighthouse.

Since owner Domenico Bastone founded his taxi company in Schorndorf in 2008, Taxi Bastone has stood for reliable service in the transport of people and goods. With 10 vehicles, a branch in Winterbach and 21 employees, Taxi Bastone offers a wide range of other services in addition to the taxi service, from long-distance journeys to airport transport and much more.

When Mr. Bastone asked us to design a new website for him, we immediately knew: This was a case for the Jamstack. A website based on the Jamstack was perfect for the requirements that we developed in a joint workshop with Mr. Bastone: A taxi website should enable users to book one of the taxi services as quickly, reliably and without any obstacles as possible . That is the central goal of the website and the technology should always be tailored to that.

The Jamstack was particularly useful here for three reasons: speed, reliability, and accessibility. However, there was also an additional challenge: the website had to be bilingual, i.e. accessible in both German and English.

The very high speed of a Jamstack website makes booking a lot easier and gives users the feeling that they are using an app instead of a website. And you can do that on your smartphone when you’re on the go, which is of course of great importance for a taxi company. Even with a very poor internet connection, for example in rural areas, a Jamstack website should still be faster than most classic websites.

Aside from the development on the Jamstack, there are still some smaller optimizations that can be used to get even more speed. For example, all images are only loaded "below-the-fold" afterwards in order not to slow down the initial page layout (so-called lazy loading). All images are also delivered in a modern format such as WebP and always in the right size, depending on the device. A smartphone user does not get any desktop-sized images that would first have to be shrunk on the client side.

Lighthouse, a Google website testing tool, gives the new Taxi Bastone website a performance score of 97 out of 100.

For a taxi company that customers rely on, it would be fatal if the website became unavailable or overloaded at certain times. Thanks to CDN, this cannot happen with a Jamstack website. No matter how big the rush is. Even if one of the edge servers in the network fails, there are still a large number of alternative servers that can step in at any time (more on this in this article).

The website also meets all the requirements for a Progressive Web App. Users can thus add the website to their smartphone screens and then even use it offline like a native app. Logically, it is not possible to book a taxi ride without an internet connection. However, it can still be useful because users can also look up information such as TAXI Bastone's phone number offline.

Accessibility should be an issue for every website these days. The aim is to develop the website in such a way that it is suitable for all users regardless of their limitations. For a taxi company that also offers services such as patient transport, this point is particularly important. For example, it is important to ensure that the website can be played back well and understandably with a screen reader (this is what tools for users with visual impairments that can read websites are called).

The static HTML that is delivered with the Jamstack at runtime is particularly easy to read for screen readers. However, there are still a few optimizations that should generally be taken into account in web development: Contact or booking forms should only use labels and not just placeholders. All images and icons should have meaningful alt tags or aria labels. When choosing colors, care should also be taken to ensure that the contrasts are strong enough to identify all the important elements. Accessible routing must ensure that the navigation to the subpages is correctly announced by screen readers. In addition, there are a variety of smaller tweaks that can help people with disabilities.

Taxi Bastone's new website scores 100 out of 100 on Lighthouse for Accessibility.

Multilingualism posed a certain challenge. Our solution for this is a language switcher in the navigation, the library react-intl from format.js and the gatsby-plugin-i18n. However, the actual implementation was quite demanding. It was important to ensure that dynamic pages generated via the CMS Prismic, such as news and job offers, can also be translated with one click. In addition, it must also be clear to Google at all times which version of a page is in which language and that it is not a duplicate. However, we were able to develop a very good solution here, which we will also use for future multilingual websites.

Even if the focus was on these four points, the website also meets all other requirements that we take for granted. The design is modern and is complemented by professional photo material that we had specially made by our long-standing partner Ralf Klamann. The website is fully responsive and has been tested on all combinations of screen size, operating system and browser. We have also implemented the basics of search engine optimization such as crawlability, sitemap and robots.txt, optimized H headings and metadata. The Core Web Vitals, which have recently become relevant for the SEO ranking, are also all very healthy, as the Lighthouse report shows. And the most important thing: the customer is happy.

Tech Stack: Gatsby.js, React, Prismic CMS, Netlify

Jamstack Case Study – Reliable, fast, barrier-free and bilingual

Climate protection is the task of the century. Not only since the latest 

 has it become clear that we must radically transform our society in order to still achieve the 1.5 degree target: only if the world becomes climate-neutral by 2050 will it still be possible Reduce global warming to 1.4°C by removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Climate neutrality by 2050 is not an easy goal. Forgoing emissions can have far-reaching consequences in some places: in developing countries, a large proportion of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, which of course cannot be avoided. It is therefore all the more important to rigorously reduce emissions wherever they are not necessary. Each of us should be aware of the responsibility and critically question our own way of life: Where do I produce emissions with my actions? What can I possibly do without?

As a web developer, my eyes inevitably fall on the Internet. 

, a Parisian think tank focusing on the energy transition, has examined the influence of the Internet on the climate and published the results in the March 2019 report "

. It estimates that the internet is responsible for 3.7% of total greenhouse gas emissions. This is comparable to global air travel. And it can be assumed that this share will increase significantly over the next 20 years as a result of digitization. The report assumes an annual increase of 9%. It is all the more important that we also make the Internet as climate-friendly as possible. In contrast to air traffic, however, this topic is relatively rarely noticed by the public.

We at flank 7 would like to do our part by paying attention to the carbon footprint of the websites we develop in our work. 

, this is also one of the reasons why we recommend the Jamstack to most of our customers. But why is a Jamstack website usually more climate-friendly than a classic website? To do this, it is important to first understand how the carbon footprint of your website can be generally measured and improved.

How can you measure the carbon footprint of your website?

Strictly speaking, the carbon footprint of your website cannot be measured, but it can be estimated relatively well. There are various tools that can make such an estimate, such as the 

The Website Carbon Calculator estimates your website's carbon footprint based on five metrics:

But what can you do now if the Website Carbon Calculator certifies that your website has a relatively large carbon footprint? On the one hand, you can compensate for the CO2. The calculator itself gives you a few suggestions here and also tells you how many trees you would need to plant to balance your site. But providers such as 

 can also help you to calculate and offset the exact CO2 emissions of your entire company (and not just the website).

How can you improve the carbon footprint of your website?

On the other hand, you should also try to improve the carbon footprint of your website. The main way to do this is to reduce the amount of data transferred. There are different set screws here:

I deliberately formulated the last two points in this way. Of course you should not try to simply reduce the session duration of your users or the number of your users. That would improve the carbon footprint, but above all it would damage your company.

Instead, it's about getting users to their destination as quickly as possible. And users for whom your website is not relevant should notice this as early as possible. Preferably, of course, before they even go to your website. This is not only in the interest of the user, but also in that of Google.

Specifically, optimizations in these areas can help:

Apart from these points, you can also make sure to choose a hoster that is as energy-efficient as possible. The so-called PUE value (Power Usage Effectiveness) is decisive here. This is formed from the total energy consumption of a data center divided by the energy consumption of the computers operated there. The further the PUE value is above 1, the more energy is required for external tasks such as cooling. The average here is a PUE of 1.67. In contrast, 

The problem with the optimization measures just described quickly becomes clear: it seems to be extremely time-consuming to optimize a classic website in terms of climate friendliness. This is where a Jamstack website can help.

Why the Jamstack is the best way to reduce your site's carbon footprint

Jamstack websites are generally more climate-friendly than classic websites.

. In summary, with the Jamstack approach, websites are built in advance with a Static Site Generator (SSG) and then delivered at run time (when a user visits the site) as a finished static website via a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This means that each user is only transferred "ready" HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Traditional websites, on the other hand, are only built at run time by sending multiple requests to the backend server each time a user visits the website. This is extremely inefficient and nowadays only necessary for a few, very dynamic websites. Each of these requests to the server causes additional CO2 emissions, which in most cases could be avoided.

In addition, the Jamstack also makes it possible to deliver the entire website via a CDN. A CDN is a network of servers that use edge computing to distribute content around the world and at high speed. This content is hosted on a central Origin Server and cached from there on a large number of Edge Nodes distributed around the world. Each user then gets the content delivered from the nearest edge node. This reduces the distance the data has to travel as much as possible. This also reduces energy consumption and thus CO2 emissions. Classic websites can (and should) also use CDNs. However, only to deliver larger content such as images and fonts. Static Jamstack sites, on the other hand, can be distributed entirely this way.

In addition, many of the optimizations described in the previous chapter are already included in our Jamstack websites:

The Jamstack only has no influence on the targeting of your performance marketing. 

The low-hanging fruit in the fight against the climate crisis

In its report, The Shift Project calls on companies to “digital sobriety” – in other words, digital abstinence. Both on an individual and collective level, everyone should question their purchasing and consumption behavior of digital products and services with regard to the CO2 balance. If companies want to have a new website built, they should therefore ask themselves: Which features will help my users to reach their goal faster? And do I really need a server and database for this, or does a static Jamstack website actually cover all my needs? In my experience, most dynamic content works just as well with static Jamstack sites.

Example company news: Most of the companies I know have a news subpage, but only rarely publish new articles there. Does it really make sense that a new request is sent to the server for each page view in order to retrieve the current articles? A Jamstack website, on the other hand, is rebuilt as soon as the company publishes a new article (automatically thanks to webhooks). After that, only static HTML, CSS and JavaScript is delivered with each page view, without further requests to a server.

Classic websites are therefore often inefficient and produce CO2 emissions for features that hardly offer any added value compared to the Jamstack variant. And in 2020 only about 1% of all websites used the Jamstack!

No, the Jamstack does not make sense for all websites. But for a large chunk of the 99% of sites that aren't using the Jamstack yet, they are. Therefore, in my opinion, the Jamstack is the absolute low-hanging fruit in the fight against CO2 emissions from websites.

And the best thing about it is: While climate protection in other areas often goes hand in hand with doing without, this is not the case at all when switching to the jamstack! Your website will also be significantly faster, more scalable, and more secure. So you get an all-round better and faster website that meets all your needs and is also better for the climate.

Stadtwerke Schorndorf

Projects (All projects)

Do you like our projects?

Blog (All posts)

The Benefits of a Jamstack Website for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Jamstack Case Study – Reliable, fast, barrier-free and bilingual

How to improve your website's carbon footprint

Flanke 7 GmbH

Jamstack Websites + Performance Marketing

A powerful combination