Getting to a high-performance website with a Directus headless CMS and detail-optimized PHP frontend

Photo by toine G on Unsplash

I most recently took the challenge to design and build a new website for Bitrock Digital Partners.

Besides a lot of product marketing, sales, and user flow requirements, it should be lightspeed fast, not require a lot of maintenance, still be secure as a fortress, and still easily editable and extensible by any other employee.
In addition, it should be easily portable to different infrastructures, and (worst case) even run on some cheap shared hosting plan.

And it should be a side project, while working on multiple other projects.

Well, mission accomplished.

Let me tell you a little bit more about how we got there.

General Considerations

Of course, we need some kind of Content Management System (CMS) to enable any kind of employee to edit data. Still, it should be guided, so no one could easily destroy the whole page or even get close to create any security flaw by accident.
WordPress is well-known and became quite strong in the last years. Still, it requires a lot of work to keep this going in a performant, yet lean way. Additionally, it is also a security risk on its own. Since it is that popular, it simply…