David asks:May 10, 2022
Is Eleventy ready for content-heavy websites?
I read your case study article, Backlinko project some weeks ago, and that is very interesting. I have some ambiguities about parts of it.
About tech stack choice, It's said:
"From the start, Backlinko was quite convinced to use Next.js, but we weren’t sure if that’s the best option for them. [...]
We’ve presented Eleventy as an alternative. At that time, Eleventy was still pretty fresh with no big real-world implementations, mostly personal blogs, and small websites. It was (kind of) risky because the team behind the project is not big and the community is relatively small."
Regarding this, I have some questions:
- For Eleventy, I know that the CMS of web.dev website is Eleventy (it has more than 1000 articles); So, do you still think that Eleventy is not suitable/ready for a real-world content-heavy website like Backlinko or things have changed???
- In the Backlinko case with combing WordPress and Nextjs, can ACF or Gutenberg be used for writing and structuring posts after this Front-end transition?? and the complex setup (different CMSs and hosts, multiple dependencies, ...) does not make maintenance hard???
- Currently, Eleventy is much more stable, with the recent SSR and Edge Rendering it’s a very interesting framework and I’d consider it again. But, I’d consider Astro even more. Partial hydration is a great booster for content-heavy websites with a small number of interactive components. We will write about this more soon, so stay tuned.
- Yes! We use ACF a lot in the Backlinko project (like 90% of content goes from ACF). I’m not sure about Gutenberg, but if it exposed data in API it will be easy to integrate it with frameworks like Next.js.
With multiple hosted CMSes, if the config is well-thought, there shouldn’t be a problem with maintenance. In the case of Backlinko, we use just WordPress.
