

How we built the new gocardless.com - jackfranklin
https://gocardless.com/blog/how-we-built-the-new-gocardless.com/

======
bshimmin
I turned off JavaScript to see if the site still worked: it did. I then
navigated to different pages to see if it was slower than the "blindingly
fast" the blog post promises: I couldn't detect any difference.

In summary, I have no idea why you would use React to build a static site, but
I sure hope they had fun doing it.

~~~
quantisan
Another datapoint. Difference in speed is obvious to me coming from a Comcast
pipe. There's an actual page load when JS is off vs instant page change when
it is on.

------
quantisan
I love what you guys have done. I'm interested to know what is the rationale
for this? Are you finding that it helps improve conversion or something?
Basically help me convince the business side of my company so that I can use
this for our site too. :)

~~~
english
The performance wasn't really the main requirement for the project, it just
fell out of the choice of using React.

We basically wanted to manage internationalised static content effectively.
That meant reusing markup, but also making sure that you're linking to pages
in the correct locale and not trying to link to pages that aren't available in
your locale.

React is obviously good for templating and its been quite straightforward to
implement the internationalisation logic too. Since it isn't much overhead at
all to render on both the client and server, it seemed a no brainer.

