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Vitaly Friedman - Big Bang Redesign: Smashing Magazine’s Relaunch, a Case Study
Smashing Magazine's relaunch story: From a slow and insecure website to a fast and secure Jamstack implementation, discover the challenges and solutions of their Big Bang Redesign.
- Big Bang Redesign: Smashing Magazine relaunched their website with a completely new architecture, switching from a custom implementation to Jamstack.
- Jamstack: A modern approach to building websites that allows for a faster and more secure way of developing and deploying applications.
- Performance was a major issue: Smashing Magazine had a massive number of visitors using ad blockers, and the website’s performance was slowed down as a result.
- Big Bang Redesign: The relaunch of Smashing Magazine was a complex process that involved refactoring code, migrating to React, and rebuilding the website’s architecture.
- Refactoring code: The team had to rewrite a significant amount of code to make it more efficient and easier to maintain.
- Migrating to React: Smashing Magazine decided to switch from Preact to React, which required a lot of work to get everything up and running again.
- Building blocks: The team built a lot of custom components to help with the redesign process.
- Using Netlify CMS: Smashing Magazine uses Netlify CMS for managing content and GoCommerce for e-commerce.
- Custom solutions: The team had to create custom solutions for things like membership and payment processing.
- Performance optimization: The team optimized the website for performance, using techniques like code splitting, critical CSS, and image compression.
- Caching and caching plugins: The team had to deal with caching plugins and server-side rendering to improve the website’s performance.
- Membership and payment processing: The team created a custom membership system and integrated payment processing with Stripe and other services.
- Cat illustrator: The team’s illustrator created a custom illustration of a cat, which has become a signature element of the Smashing Magazine brand.