Jamstack Development in Canada

About Jamstack Development

We build Jamstack sites: pages pre-rendered at build time and served from a CDN, content in a headless CMS your team can edit, and the dynamic parts handled by APIs. The result loads fast, has a small attack surface, and hands Google clean HTML to index. Senior engineers in Noida, a written scope, and a flat quote before any code.

What the engagement includes

• Next.js for static generation (SSG) and incremental static regeneration (ISR), so most pages are pre-built and content updates re-generate the affected pages without a full rebuild.
• A headless CMS chosen for how your editors actually work: Sanity, Contentful, Strapi, Storyblok, or headless WordPress. The content model is designed around your team, not a template.
• Headless commerce through Shopify's Storefront API or a similar backend for cart, checkout, and inventory, with the storefront built separately for speed and design freedom.
• Edge and CDN delivery on Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare, so pages are served from a node near the visitor instead of one origin server everyone hits at once.
• Serverless functions for the dynamic parts: contact forms, site search, newsletter signup, and webhooks, without standing up and babysitting a full server.
• Image optimization, structured data, XML sitemaps, and Core Web Vitals work built in from the start, because a fast site Google can read cleanly is the entire point of choosing Jamstack.

What a prerendered build has to settle before the first deploy in Canada

On this architecture a second language is not a runtime setting, it is a second set of files. Every page is produced at build time, so a bilingual Canadian site is two complete trees, and the content model, the routing, the sitemap, the hreflang graph and the build minutes all roughly double. That is fine when it is planned and painful when it is discovered, and the failure specific to this stack is the shortcut around it: a client side translation layer that swaps strings after the page has loaded produces one tree of files, so the French URLs either do not exist or return the English document to anything that does not run JavaScript. A version of a site that appears only once a script executes is not available on equal terms in any sense a crawler or a regulator would accept. The second planning consequence is the rebuild. A catalogue or a knowledge base at two thousand records is four thousand pages, and a full rebuild on every content edit stops being viable somewhere well below that, so on demand revalidation, where a webhook from the CMS rebuilds only the pages that changed in both languages, is a requirement of building bilingual here rather than an optimisation to add later. We would rather set that up in week one than explain in month four why a typo fix takes eleven minutes to appear.

The price on a prerendered page cannot include the tax, because the tax depends on where the buyer is and the buyer is unknown when the file is written. Canada makes that harder than most markets rather than easier. There is a federal tax everywhere, several provinces fold theirs into a single harmonised rate, three run their own retail sales tax alongside the federal one, and Quebec administers its own tax separately again, so the correct figure differs by province and by what is being sold. What can safely be frozen into a static file is therefore the pre tax price and a plain statement of what will be added, and the real number is computed once a province is known. Two things follow for the build. The cart and the checkout are dynamic even when the entire catalogue is static, which is the part that surprises teams who chose this stack to avoid running a server at all. And the tax inclusive display pattern that is correct in the United Kingdom or the European Union cannot be copied here, so a theme or a starter bought from a European vendor needs its price component rewritten rather than configured. Which provinces you are obliged to register in is your accountant's answer and it is worth having before the data model is fixed, because it decides how many numbers the checkout has to carry.

A static site is not an answer to a Canadian privacy review, because the parts that hold personal information are precisely the parts that are not static. The prerendered HTML is public content and replicating it worldwide is the point of the architecture. The form handler, the serverless functions, the search index, the headless CMS and wherever a submitted enquiry is finally delivered are a different question, and on this stack they are typically four or five separate vendors where a conventional build has one, so the record of processing has four or five rows and each is a place a reviewer will ask where the data sits. Quebec's Law 25 is the sharpest version of that question: it requires an assessment before personal information is communicated outside Quebec, and it requires that a technological product collecting personal information have its privacy settings at the highest level by default. In practice that means pinning function regions and form delivery to a region you have approved rather than letting the platform route to whichever edge is nearest, and it means an optional analytics or personalisation feature ships switched off rather than switched on with a way to decline. Both are cheap decisions at the start of a build and awkward ones after launch, because moving where a function runs changes its latency and where its logs land.

Accessibility is the obligation this architecture makes easy to fail an audit on while passing a scan. Ontario's accessibility regulation has required WCAG level AA on the public websites of designated organisations since the start of 2021, organisations above the employee threshold file a compliance report, and federally regulated entities carry their own duties under the Accessible Canada Act. An automated scanner reads the built HTML, and the built HTML on a prerendered site is usually clean, which is exactly why teams believe they are finished. What the scanner cannot see is the part that runs after hydration, and that is where this stack breaks: a client side router changes the page without a browser navigation, so by default focus stays where it was and a screen reader announces nothing, and a visitor who does not use a mouse has no idea the page changed. Modal driven navigation, infinite scroll and skeleton loading states fail from the same cause. The fixes are small and have to be written deliberately, which means moving focus to the new page heading on every route change, announcing it in a live region, and making sure the skip link targets something that exists after the route change rather than before it. Whether your organisation is designated and which deadline applies to you is a question for your own counsel, not for us.

How we work with Canadian clients

Two things shape Canadian projects more than anything technical. The first is language: if you serve Quebec, French is a legal requirement rather than a nice addition, and the rules tightened considerably under Bill 96. The French version has to be available on equal terms with the English one, which is a design constraint from the first wireframe rather than a translation task at the end.

The second is anti-spam law. CASL is stricter than most teams expect, and the penalties are real. Consent has to be express or clearly implied, records of it have to be kept, and every commercial message needs a working unsubscribe and accurate sender identification. We build those into the product rather than leaving them to whoever configures the mailing tool later, because that is where the exposure usually sits.

Questions Canadian clients ask

Jamstack Development: common questions

Other markets we work in