How a fast and secure website is built

Ready pages, no database

Each page is prepared before it is published. When someone opens the website, the server sends a page that is already complete. There is no database and no program running behind it, so the page arrives fast and there is little to attack.

Fast on a phone

Photos are sent at the right size for each screen, in modern, light formats (AVIF and WebP). The first image on the page loads first, and the others load only when they are needed. The fonts are on the website itself, with no requests to other servers. I measure every page with Google’s tools (PageSpeed Insights) on a phone, where most visits come from.

An editor for your team

Your team signs in to the website’s editor with their own accounts and changes texts, photos and pages in a form. Every save is kept with its date and author, and the website updates itself in one to two minutes. There are no plugins to update every month, as there are on WordPress.

Found on Google, Bing and AI assistants

Each topic has its own page, with its own title, description and address, in the language of the person who searches. The website tells search engines which pages exist, in which languages, and what the business is (structured data). Bing also feeds ChatGPT and other assistants.

A good image when shared

Each page has its own preview image, made automatically with the page’s title. A link sent on WhatsApp, Facebook or LinkedIn shows that image, not an empty square.

Privacy

Visits are counted without cookies and without personal data. Google Analytics, maps and videos from other services load only after the visitor accepts. Until then, the website requests nothing from third parties.

Secure by default

The website works only over a secure connection (https) and sends rules to the browser that block code from other origins. Before each publish, automatic checks confirm these rules. A publish that fails never goes live, and the website keeps showing the last good version.

The technologies

Astro for the pages, Tailwind CSS and daisyUI for the design, Sveltia CMS for the editor, and nginx in Docker to serve the website. For a web app, the part that stores data runs on its own server, with its own database.