After 20 years of making websites one way or another...
- (static HTML/CSS, initially, this was before JS really came on the scene)
- WordPress
- Lionwiki! Nobody will remember that, it was amazing though at the time
- GetSimple CMS
- Drupal
- Moodle! For the educators out there
- Probably some others...
...I decided it was time to start testing out a few other options. I've spent most of my career on the SEO and analytics side of things, so the actual "building websites from scratch" bit has always been adjacent rather than central. But I keep bumping into the limits of what I can do with WordPress and page builders, and I figured it was time to learn how the other half lives.
Why Vercel?
Honestly? Because it kept coming up. Every time I read about modern web development — Next.js, React, server components, edge functions — Vercel was right there. And the pitch is compelling: push your code to Git, and Vercel builds and deploys it automatically. No FTP, no cPanel, no SSH-ing into a server to restart something. Just git push and it's live.
Coming from WordPress, where deploying a change means logging into a dashboard, clicking update, and hoping nothing breaks — or worse, editing files on a live server via FTP like it's 2008 — this felt almost too easy.
First impressions
The deploy workflow is brilliant. You connect a GitHub repo, and every push to main triggers a production deploy. Every pull request gets its own preview URL. I cannot overstate how useful preview URLs are — being able to send someone a link to see exactly what a change looks like before it goes live is something I didn't know I needed until I had it.
The dashboard is clean. It tells you what you need to know (deploy status, domains, recent activity) without drowning you in options. After years of WordPress dashboards cluttered with plugin notifications and upsells, this is refreshing.
It's fast. Not just the sites it hosts — the whole experience. Deploys take seconds. The dev server starts instantly. Pages load quickly. When you're used to WordPress sites that take 3-4 seconds to load because of seventeen plugins and a page builder, a static Next.js site feels like cheating.
The learning curve
Here's the thing though: Vercel is easy. Next.js and React are not — at least not if you're coming from WordPress-land. The deployment platform is the simple part. The hard part is learning to think in components, understanding server vs client rendering, getting your head around the App Router, and accepting that JSX is just how we write HTML now apparently.
I'm still very much in the "copy an example and modify it until it works" phase. This very site is built on a Vercel starter template that I've been gradually customising. But that's fine — that's how you learn. I learned WordPress the same way fifteen years ago, and I learned HTML the same way before that (right-click, View Source, borrow liberally).
What I'm planning to try next
- More complex layouts — this site is deliberately minimal, but I want to push into things like dynamic pages, API routes, and interactive components
- Other frameworks — Astro and SvelteKit both look interesting, and Vercel supports them too. I've also been getting to grips with Webflow for client work
- Edge functions — the idea of running server-side logic at the CDN edge sounds useful for things like geolocation redirects and A/B testing, which is very relevant to my SEO work
- Actually designing something — so far I've been hiding behind starter templates. At some point I need to learn enough CSS to build something from scratch that doesn't look like a developer made it
This post is a work in progress and will be updated as I get to grips with the Vercel setup (and the technologies it supports). But so far? I'm a fan. The gap between "I want to try something" and "it's live on the internet" has never been shorter.