In the past I had to take over the management of the family hotel website, a site created with WordPress in the distant past (not from me) and never properly maintained.
In order to not reinvent the wheel, I chose to keep the existing technology stack, renewing it in terms of: UI, functionality and performance.
The results were poor, with a site soon becoming unmanageable and with an ever-growing fear of making significant changes.
The pinnacle was reached when we had to use a plugin to manage the restaurant menu in order to "simplify" the input from the end user. The plugin, inevitably, was very limited and could only expose a couple of UIs (not properly done).
After accumulating some experience with GatsbyJS (this is the second time I go into production with it) I decided to do a graphic makeover, a simplification of the UX and a better manageability of the contents.
📜 The menu is now generated from a simple JSON that dynamically creates the web page based on the contents. Changing the content has become too easy and the UI has been created ad-hoc (clean and readable), respecting the wishes of the owner.
⭐ Review ratings on major online portals are now displayed from a JSON file. Before, I had to create images by hand with the reported vote, at each change of vote. Now this process can be automated.
Bonus: the review collection is a component, reusable in the whole website avoiding copy-past errors.
📝 The writing of the articles has been converted to simple markdown files which then allow you to generate web pages according to a predefined template. The latter is essential because it allows you to have consistent and error-free pages. Again, it prevents to have strange copy-past errors of WordPress pages.
⚡ The performances, needless to say, shot up. This is because a static site builder offers many features: progressive image loading, page loading speed, and general optimizations.
Here you can find my article about progressive image loading.
💻 Let's not forget that as a developer the goal is always to optimize time and having created the site with Gatsby made it possible for me to have excellent security and speed in releases and updates, because I can try the site on my PC before make a release (automated of course). This thing on WordPress was unthinkable, I would have had to provide myself with a staging site, make the changes and then replicate them on production.
For the more curious, this is the site: https://www.hotelmodernoassisi.com/
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