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Moving to Netlify

Posted in Development and Serverless

I’ve never enjoyed hosting. After all these years I’m comfortable enough poking round a server, but I’d be perfectly happy if I never had to SSH into another Linux box as long as I live. And Netlify looks like a good route into that happy place!

My website is now built with a static site generator and I moved it from my own server to Netlify a couple of weeks ago. So far, I’ve been very impressed. Here’s a quick run-down of my thoughts:

  • Google Lighthouse for ‘Best Practices’ was previously sitting in the high 90s, which was fine, but now it’s coming back with a perfect score
  • Deployment is easy, and I don’t need a service like DeployHQ sitting between GitHub and my server
  • SSL certificates are a piece of cake to set up and cron jobs for renewals are taken care of automatically
  • I had a concern about the Netlify subdomain (tempertemper.netlify.com) but I got around fairly easily with redirect in the Netlify config file
  • It opens the door to using server-side stuff like forms in my static site (via Netlify functions), though I don’t want to go too far down this route as it moves away from one of the things a static site should be: portable onto any server
  • I love the idea of Netlify Analytics – no more snooping by Google, and I don’t need or want any more info than Netlify provide anyway

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More posts

Here are a couple more posts for you to enjoy. If that’s not enough, have a look at the full list.

  1. Alt text for CSS generated content

    There’s an interesting feature in Safari 17.4 that allows content added with CSS to have ‘alt’ text. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

  2. The accessibility conversations you want to be having

    In most companies, accessibility conversations centre around WCAG compliance, but that’s just the start. Thinking beyond that is where you want to be!