10 Migrating to the Jamstack

 

This chapter covers

  • Understanding migration challenges
  • Solving build-time issues on large sites
  • Strategies to migrate existing site functionality
  • Exploring popular third-party Jamstack services
  • Tips and strategies from the Jamstack community for making a migration

You’ve made it to the last chapter, and hopefully, by now you’re convinced about the benefits of using the Jamstack for your web development projects. You may even want to migrate an existing project to the Jamstack. The good news is that this is entirely feasible and, in fact, quite common. The bad news is that there’s no one-size-fits-all tool or wizard that can handle the migration; it is, for the most part, a customized solution for every migration.

There are so many factors that go into a migration, each one unique. This chapter aims to give you some guidance for planning your migration, as well as some resources and tools that can help ease the process. This process is more than just a technical challenge. It can involve a lot of stakeholders and other organizational considerations that you’ll have to manage, but we will primarily focus on the technical migration aspects.

10.1 What kind of site are you migrating?

10.1.1 Content-heavy sites

10.1.2 Web applications

10.1.3 Large sites

10.2 What functionality do you need to migrate?

10.2.1 Popular third-party Jamstack services

10.3 Making the move

10.3.1 Don’t move everything at once

10.3.2 Pick a headless CMS up front

10.3.3 Consider building templates from scratch rather than porting

10.3.4 Keep as much as possible

10.4 What’s next?

Summary