The project decision was to move away from traditional CMS solutions for building out websites, but still required the marketing & product team to be able to update and maintain the website content.

My solution was to build a headless website that's detached from the Content management system, and generate & deploy a static build of the site.

In the website we built for our sister company - Private Wealth Global, we used a SSG GatsbyJs, which fit into our already React based stack quite well, however maintaining the site from a devops perspective proved to be a dependency nightmare.

For this project I chose to rather go with 11ty, which is HTML based, and has a generally unopinionated Nodejs structure to handle api data. What this means in the real world, is a far simpler, more traditional build process that outputs pure html, css and javascript.

We rely on the awesome StrapiCMS project, which we host ourselves within docker containers, and is completely detached from the site apart from hitting the resulting api through builds.

Since the resulting output of the site is pure static files, our hosting setup could be equally simple. We host the site on AWS S3, attached to an AWS Cloudfront CDN. It's largely as simple as that!

We handled the deployment process through git branch based CI/CD in Jenkins. This way we could reliably automate staging deploys, and provide a painless mostly-human-free production deploy.

Going static in this way doesn't entirely remove all complexities of managing content however, and in our case we still had the issue of having to rebuild the site everytime content changes. To solve this issue we attached webhooks from the cms into Jenkins as a separate build to update both our staging builds and production.