Jamstack Vs MERN Vs WordPress – A Comprehensive Comparison For Business Owners For Optimum Web Development Practices

The market today is cluttered with startups and new businesses. As you read, there's a company or an eCommerce website going live right now and that website could be competing against your business in the coming weeks. With so much clutter and competition, how does one manage to make their business standout?

With statistics also revealing that close to 48% of visitors or users look at website design as a major factor when determining the credibility of a business, the pressure is high in launching a website that is scalable, solid, aesthetic and super-functional.

But there’s good news.

Similar to how the market is filled with businesses, developers also have a handful of web development tools and frameworks with them to design and develop websites. But the effectiveness, efficiency and impact each web development tool and framework offers is different and unique. That's why it becomes important to take a wise choice when selecting a web development solution for your business.

And this post is all about helping you make the right choice. Amongst the best web development tools, we have handpicked and compared the three most popular tools to give you an extensive idea of the functionality and benefits of each. We have selected diverse parameters and analysed them for the three tools so that by the end of the article, you would know which tool to go for.

So, what are we waiting for? Let's get started.

Jamstack Vs. MERN Vs. WordPress

Parameters For Comparison

• Performance
• Security
• Code Reusability
• Scalability

An Overview Of The Tools

JAMstack

Coined in 2016, this web development architecture blends components and elements web developers admire and makes websites faster, more secure and highly scalable. At a time when static websites were ruling the scene, JAMstack arrived to pave the way for a more contemporary approach to website development and deployment, offering a whole new kind of website experience.

For the uninitiated, JAMstack stands for Javascript, API and Markup and these three elements work towards offering outputs to website users who are consistently making newer requests from the frontend. JAMstack offers dynamic responses by deploying templated markups. So, instead of fetching new HTML pages from the database, JAMstack offers a readily-available static page as a response.

MERN

MERN arrives as one of the most sought platforms or tools by startups to develop their websites and portals. From allowing developers the agility in developing a website to offering visitors and users a dynamic website that is scalable, MERN ticks all the checkboxes required for optimum web development and web experience.

Similar to JAMstack, MERN is a compilation of technologies and tools that include MongoDB, Express, React and Node.js. MERN brings together every single element involved in web development such as backend, frontend and database for seamless development processes.

WordPress

The oldest and the most commonly used web development tool, WordPress has been prevalent – or rather dominant – in the market ever since its inception in 2003. Statistics released in the year 2019 reveal that close to 34% of the internet is powered by WordPress websites. What started out as a relatively simple tool to set up and publish blogs is now a CMS giant that allows companies and businesses to set up websites, run online stores, manage CRMS and do more.

Performance

MERN

MERN stack offers the most superior performance in terms of speed and overall functionality. Unlike other web development tools like WordPress, MERN stack leverages the potential of Node.js. This means that websites developed with this framework can perform a range of actions simultaneously and asynchronously. This in turn means that websites can handle heavy elements and requests with ease without showing any lag or glitch to users.

JAMstack

Like we all know, the time taken by a website to load and display content directly influences user experience. Statistics also reveal that if a website takes more than two seconds to load, visitors are most likely to abandon the website or brand forever. In such cases, JAMstack offers a reliable solution to this problem by eliminating the requirement to request a new page every time an action is taken by a user at the frontend.

Instead, it generates a pre-built page (a number of which are readily deployed at CDN) and shows it to users. This also removes the need to maintain a massive infrastructure.

WordPress

WordPress is developed on legacy languages like PHP. This means that the performance is comparatively lesser than what MERN stack would offer. On the other hand, WordPress offers a significantly better performance than JAMstack. There are thousands of plugins developers or website owners can choose from to speed up their websites and optimize website performance. This liberty does offer an edge to the CMS tool.

Winner: MERN

Code Reusability

MERN

The code developers write on MERN can be interchanged and reused on other eCommerce websites or frameworks. This means developers have to build specific modules or components just once and reuse the same code for deployment somewhere else. Now, this is beneficial in two aspects -

• it lowers the costs involved in the development of a website or a project
• and it significantly decreases the time taken to develop a website

This is by far the biggest advantage of MERN.

JAMstack

JAMstack falls behind in this category as it hardly offers any code reusability features.

WordPress

Code reusability is not applicable to WordPress. The approach with WordPress is completely different as users or website owners have to hardly code anything to get their website up and running. All they have to do is choose templates and install plugins to get their features implemented. While this looks like convenience, it is also a constraint in terms of customization. WordPress users have very few options to get their websites function the way they want to. However, if you're an advanced developer or a pro WordPress user, you could tweak certain codes at the backend to add or modify website functionalities.

Winner: MERN

SEO Benefits

MERN

One of the major factors that influence the rankings of your website is your website's speed and load time. Because MERN offers one of the fastest page load times, it positively influences SEO parameters and helps in getting a boost in website credibility as well. With this taken care of, your website developed with MERN has higher chances of ranking on the first page of search results.

JAMstack

JAMstack also offers commendable SEO benefits thanks to its fast load time and performance. Because interactions with servers are less and information is readily available, SEO gets a go ahead as well.

WordPress

WordPress offers a lot of insights and analytics to help you boost your SEO rankings. Besides, it also helps you install plugins that can automatically disable elements that are slowing your website down or hindering the performance of your website. However, these require additional manual intervention.

Winner: MERN

Security

MERN

Websites and applications developed using MERN stack can be seamlessly integrated with 3^rd party hosting service providers. This means that all your data and information can be made confidential and secured, preventing the cropping up for vulnerabilities and online threats.

JAMstack

JAMstack also offers superior website security benefits. This is because there are very few interactions with servers for information retrieval. The lesser the interaction, the lesser the chances of attacks. However, one factor we should note here is that only the threats associated with backend can be eliminated. The vulnerabilities associated with the frontend you choose still exist.

WordPress

WordPress has the least security features of the three. Statistics reveal that almost 70% of WordPress installations are vulnerable to threats, hacks and attacks. As far as security is concerned, the responsibility is completely on the website owner or the developer. There are no default security features that come with WordPress unlike MERN or JAMstack.

Winner: MERN

Scalability

MERN

If you're building an eCommerce website, scalability is a major factor. Ecommerce websites demand continuous modifications, additions and changes and they need to be consistently monitored for scalability with approaching sales and festivals. As far as scalability is concerned, MERN handles the challenge like a boss. Because it is also powered by MongoDB – a noSQL database – it offers scalability and cloud compatibility features like no other.

JAMstack

JAMstack applications and websites are mostly scalable because they feature a frontend which is fast and a backend which is light.

WordPress

WordPress websites are extremely scalable and they can seamlessly handle millions of requests, thousands of users who have simultaneously signed in and offered super-fast responses for search queries.

Winner: MERN

Wrapping Up

MERN is a clear winner from our comparison and analysis. For developers out there, it offers a lot of edge in the development process like code reusability and customization features.

For users, it elevates website experiences and allows them to seamless execute actions. So, regardless of whether you are building complex websites that require tons of modules and components or are developing a comparatively simpler website with minimal features and maximum performance, MERN is the right development tool for you.

However, we should also understand that the impact and effectiveness of web development tools and frameworks vary depending on your idea and business requirements. Because we focus on custom development projects, frameworks like JAMstack and WordPress could be the most appropriate for your business ideas, too. It all boils down to what works best for your business, what doesn’t and finding the balance between the two.

That’s why we recommend getting in touch with us with your ideas and we would suggest the best tools and frameworks to develop the game-changing product. Reach out to us today.