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Jekyll and CloudCannon - fast, secure, with website backups as standard
Jekyll and CloudCannon website designer Cornwall
Jekyll websites offer some great benefits including - better performance, higher security, backups and a lower cost of scaling when visitor traffic increases. It should definitely be on your consideration list if you’re thinking about a new website.
CloudCannon is a content management system giving you a great website editing experience, including editing content inline. CloudCannon also hosts your website and delivers it over the cloud through a super fast global content delivery network (CDN). In addition, CloudCannon doesn’t require updating, so you can say goodbye to worries over whether your CMS is up-to-date and protecting your website.
Fort can create you an effective, responsive website using Jekyll and CloudCannon - it’s a perfect combination. Many businesses are now converting to this way of managing their websites. We’re based in Falmouth, Cornwall but can work with you wherever you are situated.
Higher performance with Jekyll websites
Firstly it is important to note that, it’s widely assumed that the speed of your website is a serious factor taken into consideration by Google when ranking search results, it’s common-sense… Google wants answers delivered quickly to searches. A site must be able to respond quickly.
Jekyll is known as a static site builder. What does this mean? It takes all your content (a collection of files and images) and each time you make a change to your content it re-builds your website into a static html website. Why is this good, aren’t static html websites a thing of the past? It’s brilliant because there isn’t a database involved; for example, in the case of WordPress, your pages don’t exist until someone wants to visit that page… WordPress then connects to its database and pieces together all the content so that the page can be delivered to the visitor - it grabs the header, footer, navigation and any content you’ve written from your posts and pages. Communicating with the database and piecing together all the content takes valuable computer resource and time. With Jekyll websites, there are no databases, the pages are already there - it’s simply delivered to the website visitor.
Many businesses find themselves in a very competitive marketplace in Cornwall, the performance of your website could be a critical factor where you are losing out to your competition - a Jekyll website could be the answer.
Improved Security
Hackers are always searching for doors into your website - often these are automated attacks. Any technology used to run your website is a potential gateway for a hacker to attack your site. The software used to power databases can provide a potential doorway for a hacker. In the past, vulnerabilities with MySQL (the database used by WordPress for example) have given hackers direct access to website servers.
Jekyll websites don’t have a database, so you’re immediately reducing the opportunities for a hacker to get to your site.
Another doorway for a hacker is through the scripts (code) that your website uses to produce its web pages. The majority of database driven websites are also using the scripting language called PHP - in the past this has had known vulnerabilities and has been a root cause for hacked websites.
When using a Jekyll website, your site will be in plain html, it won’t be using PHP so again you’re reducing the technologies that hackers have been used to for gaining access to websites.
Whenever we are discussing web projects with clients in Cornwall, or beyond, we ensure we discuss the security of your website and how we ensure that your content is safe and protected - content being a significant investment these days. As explained above Jekyll websites minimise the opportunities for hackers to attack your site and therefore we would highly recommend this solution to you.
Backups and version control
When considering a new website, not only should you be considering the security of your site but also a plan for disaster and recovery including if a) the site is hacked and taken down or b) a server crashes and you lose your content.
When using Jekyll websites with Cloud Cannon this is all taken care of. It’s an important change to how your website works and is managed. Every time you make a change a snapshot of your site (all its files) is copied to a service called GitHub, essentially this is a remote backup of your site, but it is more than this… this backup comes with version control. Version control means that should you need to roll back your site to an earlier version your developer can do it for you.
If you’re discussing website design with your developer in Cornwall, or wherever they may be, you should discuss version control with them and how you would roll back the site to an earlier should the worse happen.
Easy to use content management system
CloudCannon is the content management system for your Jekyll website; it’s a great solution that makes editing easy. It has some excellent features including the following.
- Content editing - where you can write content in a similar environment as WordPress
- Backups - each change you make to your site is synchronised with GitHub
- Blogging - posts can be categorised and managed in the same way as WordPress
- Content Delivery Network - your website is deployed through a cloud-based content delivery network ensuring that your content is speedily delivered anywhere in the world
We highly recommend using Jekyll and CloudCannon as an extremely effective way to deploy your website and ensure it is fast, secure and backed up - this website is using Jekyll.
If you’d like to discuss this option with us please do not hesitate to contact us on the details below, we’re able to talk you through it and also demonstrate the systems to you, even if you aren’t based in Cornwall we can connect over video conferencing and screen sharing.
By: Tim Bowerbank
Role: Web Developer