Every startup has its own IT infrastructure that is usually curved by tech knowledge and budget.

Hopefully, the first year of Wequire’s website development will serve with a couple of lessons for early-stage developers while exposing some know-how as well.

1. Starting with website-builders and a simple stack

Before 2020, we’ve started to experiment with various website-builder platforms such as Wix, WordPress, or Shopify to accomplish our goal of building the property platform we imagined. It soon became evident that they won’t satisfy our needs with regards to customization and flexibility, so we decided to start from scratch.

Back these days our component stack was the simplest imaginable. It consisted of a Java/Spring-based backend API and a React-based SPA (single-page application) frontend. For our platform, we chose Heroku as it provided the easiest solution for a reasonable price, and our infrastructure was simple enough.

We didn’t want to dwell on customization details. In the meantime, we also started to discover the capabilities of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

2. Migrating to SSR framework - Next.js

As our frontend entered its MVP stage, we’ve realized that the client-side rendered SPA won’t meet our requirements as it built a burden between us and the successful SEO strategy - Not stating that SPAs cannot be SEO friendly, but optimizing them isn’t easy and straightforward.

The time has come to choose a server-side rendering (SSR) framework. Luckily we were still in an early stage. Our pick was Next.js. It is a free and open-source framework, built specifically to work with React.

Additionally, it has a growing community and is evolving fast.

Our frontend application code was migrated to Next.js. We are trying to keep up with their pace and introduce the features provided by the framework to our app.

#nextjs #react #frontend #ux #aws