Right around the time that the Ionic team came out with Stencil.js our company made a brand transition from Webjunto to OpenForge. Since we are all massively in love with all things technology; we said "OMG - An opportunity to play with Stencil! Let's build our Website using Stencil as a web-component pre-compiler and scratch that Wordpress B.S. It will be so much faster!".

From a business owner's perspective, it was a perfect opportunity to transition from Wordpress to something that we built with our own hands. We could Open Source and talk about it. It allowed us to train our team on a new technology while simultaneously applying it to something useful.

But - we were unprepared. That's when the pain hit.

Our Assumption

We drastically underestimated how much is truly built into Wordpress that we never think about. Between Blog, Page, User Management, and SEO capabilities - it's a huge set of features, and eliminates a lot of need for process internally in the team between the design, dev, and business departments.

We also assumed that anything that was in Wordpress we could easily build, and to our team's credit we can build the features; however - what we don't have is the process for identifying what needs to be reviewed across departments.

For instance; how many business people think about the manifest.json file? How many people (in a full design & dev team) are qualified to identify SEO mismatches between content and url routing? These things are automatically provided and identified by Wordpress and Yoast, and we didn't even realize it.

The benefit was that it created a need to more tightly integrate the 3 major departments at our company (Design, Dev, Business); however, the down side was that we had to create a process for this and we were completely unprepared.

My Advice

Was it worth it? I think so due to the training to the team, PWA expertise, and lessons learned; however, on a scale of 'how worth it' it was not as clearly a win as I expected.

I'll break down my advice into a bulleted list of what was worth it, and what pieces we missed. My hope is if you would like to try the same thing for your company, you'll have a bit of a headstart on what troubles may arise.

Worth It

• The experience & training (as we move into single-source PWA's)
• The speed (It feels like the road-runner compared to WP)
• The control (fully customizable, without any plugin development)

Harder Than Expected / Unexpected

• SEO Management. What's the replacement for Yoast?
  • Robots.txt
  • Manifest File
  • URL Routing Strategy (and who reviews this?)
  • 404 Page for old I.E. (we just redirect)
  • Canonical Links
  • Alt Text to images (we keep forgetting - need to update process)
• Polyfills
• Lighthouse Optimizations (local vs. deployed)
• Smooth Scrolling
• Accessibility

There were some more items that didn't make it into our changelog, as I think of them I'll update the post.

Hope this helps folks!

~Jedi