We realized that a lot of people don’t recognize the importance of a fast, accessible and well performing webpage. So we are going to use this opportunity to tell you about how we make our websites and why we have chosen the tools we use. We also want to explain why a state of the art website is important for any business. We will also be following up on the subjects mentioned here in more details in the coming months. A few weeks ago we launched a website that scored 100/100 on Google’s PageSpeed Insights. We did this by using the GatsbyJS framework.

Gatsby builds the fastest possible websites. Instead of users waiting for pages when requested, Gatsby pre-built pages are instantly delivered to users wherever they are. With Gatsby we can also do whatever we want and connect to anything we want. We love it! A slow website is bad not only for the end-user, but also for search engine optimization (SEO). Meaning that your website will rank lower in search engine results. That translates to fewer customer conversions for you. There are many ways of improving the speed of a website and we use all of them.

Many people think you need Wordpress in order to be able to edit the content of websites. That is far from the truth, you simply need an CMS.

So if your website has a CMS you can still edit your page yourself, just like in Wordpress. You simply log in and work with the easy to use interface. Our favorite is Prismic, a headless CMS. Headless CMS means that we can connect your content to any sort of frontend(website) since it uses a content API.

The main reason why many people still go for Wordpress is that it can be cheaper in the initial setup, but agencies tend to not tell customers about the effects of technical debt (low initial cost and high subsequent service cost). Many agencies even have a monthly fee since the maintenance cost is so high on these older technologies. Since we use the most state of the art tech we avoid technical debt that can become very expensive in the long run. If you have used Wordpress you must have encountered a problem where it takes a long time to implement a small change. You will never have that problem with Bonsai since we are in full control of our work.  Frameworks like Wordpress run on “plugins” that have huge overhead and do way more than the user actually needs. And each “plugin” you add the page becomes slower and slower. When we add features to our projects they will have significantly lower impact on the speed of the website than what you get with Wordpress.

A very important thing for businesses and for anyone trying to get word out into the world today is SEO.

All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing rank their search results based on what the engine considers most relevant to users. SEO is all organic, paid search ads is another thing where you can pay money to get ranked higher on search engines. We at Bonsai work with our customers to find the best way to reach the people who need to see their message.

At Bonsai we don’t only have great experience in writing code for websites. We are also great at designing them. When we design a website we want to get  much input from our customers to work around as we can. Branding is very important and having your website reflect your company. You have to tell your customers who you are and why they should choose you. How do you want your customers to  feel when they see your content? We find that many companies neglect their branding, which can be harmful. Get people the feeling that you know what you are doing, a nice website does that.

We have heard the phrase “What is so bad about wordpress? It’s just a tool”. Well yes but tools can vary in quality. Have you tried drilling a hole in a concrete wall with a drill without impact, it takes forever and you ruin the drill bit. A wordpress site is the same, it takes a long time to load and it can ruin your content. Wordpress was great 10-20 years ago and has helped many companies develop, but in our opinion it’s days are long over and companies need to react to that quickly. We would only recommend using a page builder such as Wordpress if you are going to set up your page yourself. And even then we would rather recommend using wix or squarespace. If you are paying a professional, don’t settle for Wordpress. Wordpress is restricting, low on security, has problems with updates, is horrible at scaling and has a huge technical debt. That’s why we don’t settle for wordpress and instead make the fastest, most stunning websites you will ever see. If you have any questions regarding these subjects or your own website, please don’t hesitate to reach out!