Jamstack Development in the UK

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 UK rules change about a Jamstack build

Start with consent, because it lands awkwardly on this architecture. PECR is what governs cookies and similar storage in the UK, non-essential tags cannot be set on a visitor's device before they agree, and the ICO's published position is that refusing has to be as easy as accepting. A pre-rendered site answers almost every request with one cached file shared by everyone, while the consent choice lives in a cookie on the individual visitor's device. You can make the edge read that cookie, but varying a cached page on it splits the cache and gives up the delivery you chose this stack for, so in practice the gating happens in the browser after the HTML has already arrived. Every analytics snippet, embedded map, video frame, heat map and chat widget therefore has to be held back and loaded only once a choice exists, which is build work rather than a setting in a plugin. We wire it that way from the start, because the usual failure on a static site is a banner that appears politely after the scripts it was meant to gate have already fired. Whether a particular tag counts as strictly necessary for your service is a judgement for your own counsel rather than for us.

The hosting question arrives early in a UK procurement pack, and on this architecture the one-line answer the form wants is misleading in both directions. The pre-rendered pages are copies of your public content and are replicated to edge locations worldwide on purpose, because that replication is the speed, so 'global CDN' is the accurate answer to the box and it is also the answer that stops a legal review dead. The personal data is somewhere else: in the headless CMS, in the serverless functions behind forms and search, in the search index if there is one, and wherever a submitted form is finally delivered. Those are the parts that go in a region you approve, which for UK clients is usually London or Dublin, and those are the parts your questionnaire is really asking about. The other thing worth writing down is that a build shaped like this has more suppliers in it than a single server does. The CMS, the form handler, the search provider and the image pipeline are each their own vendor, so your record of processing has four or five rows where a conventional stack has one, and every one of them is a question your reviewer would otherwise ask you at the end instead of the beginning. We process from India, which is an onward transfer however the rest is arranged, and the route your counsel takes for it, the IDTA or the Addendum to the EU clauses, is their decision and we sign whatever they land on.

If the build is a storefront, price display is the piece to settle before the first component is written. A price shown to a UK consumer has to include VAT, and UK VAT is not a single rate: children's clothing, most books and most food are zero rated, and a reduced rate applies to a short list of others. A commerce API written for the US market defaults to a net price with tax added at the end, which is right where it comes from and wrong here, so tax-inclusive display and the rate category belong in the data model and in the CMS as real fields rather than being discovered during launch week. It matters more on this architecture than on a server-rendered store because the figure is frozen into HTML that may then sit on a CDN for hours. A server-rendered store computes the number per request, so a stale price there is a cache misconfiguration; here the cache is the delivery model itself, and invalidation has to be designed rather than assumed. So product pages rebuild from a webhook the moment a price changes in the commerce platform rather than waiting for the next scheduled deploy, and trade customers who are shown figures excluding VAT get their own template instead of a conditional inside the cached one. Selling into the Republic of Ireland is a separate VAT jurisdiction with its own rates and its own registration questions, so those figures are resolved at the cart rather than baked into a page, and we would rather your accountant confirmed the treatment than have the storefront built around an assumption about it. The same discipline applies to stock, because a cached page that cheerfully advertises an item the commerce engine sold an hour ago is the most common way a fast storefront still annoys the customer.

How we work with UK clients

UK engagements tend to start with procurement questions rather than technical ones. Who holds the data, which law governs the contract, whether you can produce a record of processing if the ICO asks. We answer those in the proposal instead of leaving them to a legal review three weeks in, because that review is where UK projects usually stall.

Invoicing is the other thing worth settling early. We are outside the UK, so services we supply generally fall under the reverse charge and your finance team accounts for the VAT rather than paying it to us. Our invoices say so explicitly. We quote in pounds, the figure does not move with the exchange rate mid-project, and payment by bank transfer avoids the card fees that make a five-figure invoice unnecessarily expensive.

Questions UK clients ask

Jamstack Development: common questions

Other markets we work in