In some upcoming posts, we'll provide more details about the practical steps to implementing Next-Drupal. For now we present eight excellent reasons for building your website with technology that delivers speed, security and sustainability in ways that will become even more important in the years ahead.
Next-Drupal gives you the best of both worlds, a powerful open-source CMS and a modern front-end
Drupal is a powerful content architecture platform used for complex editorial workflows and serving content as JSON. Next.js is a powerful React-based library creating unique digital experiences. Combine the two, and you get a turbo-charged content management experience.
Next-Drupal keeps your site secure—better than any other technology
Next-Drupal sites hosted at Vercel are static file websites, that is it. You are not relying on the security profiles of multiple pieces of software like Nginx, Mysql, PHP, etc, to render the front-end of the site. There is no backdoor with a static site.
Next-Drupal makes traffic spikes irrelevant, serving up millions of pages per second with ease
Static sites are hard to overload with traffic. Your Drupal instance is not exposed to the public internet. Next-Drupal sites access Drupal using lightweight JSON API calls for content. Next.js providers like Vercel push your site to the Edge of the network instantly, delivering advanced Edge caching that keeps your site 100% available no matter the traffic.
Next-Drupal makes it simple to push code without breaking things, no longer relying on bespoke custom tooling
Pushing changes to Drupal requires custom workflows tied to priority tooling your developers need to learn. It is not easy. New developers coming out of school would rather use modern workflows for front-end code development.
Next-Drupal makes your sites lightning fast, which leads to higher conversion rates
Speed is a factor that sets your site apart from others. Positive Google SEO metrics are based on speed. Next.js on Vercel is an ultrafast way to serve up your website. Next.js will make your website faster than any native self rendered Drupal site. Next-Drupal does not require the usual set of shims to make Drupal sites fast, Reddis, Varnish, CDN, Drupal Cache, etc. Next.js is a simple stack delivering exceptional performance.
Next-Drupal uses modern SEO methods to increase the visibility of your site
Performance is an especially important factor for Google search engine rankings. Newer criteria such as First Contentful Paint (FCP), First Paint (FP), Time To First Byte (TTFB) now matter. Using Next-Drupal and Vercel you get a turbo-charged website performance that cannot be matched. Developers have granular control over Google's newest SEO requirements.
Next-Drupal facilitates closer agency-client collaboration, and you can do more faster with tools like Vercel Live
Developer tooling is evolving. We are moving towards tool-sets that allow front-end collaboration between developers and marketers in real time. Marketing teams are obsessive about performance and tweaking the front-end of websites. Traditional developer methods are getting old and are ripe for disruption with new and better ways. Vercel Live is an example of how collaborative working is evolving. When you use Next-Drupal and Vercel you have access to these modern ways of working as a team.
Next-Drupal and Turborepo makes web development more efficient and makes your developers happy!
Developer tooling is another area ready for disruption. Turborepo is a high-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript codebases that engineers love working with. The old school methods work, but new engineers want something improved and modern. Turborepo abstracts complex configurations needed for most monorepos into a single cohesive build system, giving your developer a world-class development experience without the maintenance burden. Since time is money, reducing maintenance issue is really important. When you use Next-Drupal and Vercel you benefit from these disruptive new developer workflows.
Ok, that's it for now. Stay tuned for more in this series and if you'd like to setup a call to discuss Next-Drupal with us, please get in touch.
