The Developer Experience as a key to better financial results - Vercel

A better equipped and configured development environment makes dev work more pleasant and faster. Today I’d like to give a broad overview of Vercel, one of the solutions you may consider when it comes to choosing a cloud platform to host your website.

What is Vercel?

Vercel is a cloud-based platform that enables developers to host websites and web services that deploy instantly and scale automatically, and it gives us basic automation on CI/CD implementation. Additionally, you can make instant rollback if needed, run checks before the production release, monitor error logs, performance and analytics. The platform has a user-friendly interface and requires a minimal configuration.

Numbers don't lie - Vercel is used by over 100k developers every month. Among them we can find representatives of leaders such as Netflix, eBay, Nintendo or Meta.

It's super easy to deploy websites on Vercel

By connecting your GitHub repository to Vercel, you can simply deploy the master branch to Vercel domains - and it does all the hard work by:

1. Instant site deployment on a global CDN with one click,
2. Ensuring your site is always online with intelligent monitoring and auto-scaling of frontend capacity and
3. Taking care of SSL and HTTPS certificates on your behalf.

Cool built-in tools boosting DX

Vercel's Image Optimization can be used with both the Next.js and Nuxt.js image components. When these components are used, images are cached at the Edge and shared across the Vercel Edge Network, making them available to all visitors at their nearest point.

Main benefits of Image Optimization:

• Small file sizes allows images to appear faster
• Images are displayed in a size appropriate to the end user's device screen
• When used with either Next.js or Nuxt image components, a blur-up placeholder can be used to indicate the image is loading
• Images can be lazy-loaded to improve initial page load performance

Vercel Analytics is an analytic tool that can help you find answers to common questions like:

• Which pages are people looking at?
• Where are they coming from?
• Does your website load fast?
• Is the website responsive and visually stable?

How does it differs from Google Analytics, you may ask? Basically it is not a 3rd-party script loaded on the client's side, so it prevents clients' browsers to be overloaded and slow down. You will no longer irritate the users with cookie policy pop-ups and all of that is fast and fully compatible with the GDPR.

Vercel Previews makes the agile process fast and easy. The preview environment allows both developers and testers to share pieces of features in real time and even give live feedback. An old saying tells us that a picture is worth a thousand words, so how about interactive pictures?

Vercel’s approach to A/B testing is different from others. Their A/B tests don’t run in the browser causing a layout shift, they run on Edge Middleware, so users will only see what you want them to see.

As an additional pro I have to add here the zero-configuration support for 54 frameworks, among which you can find Vue, React, Angular, Svelte or the aforementioned Next and Nuxt js.

To sum up all the above, I can say that Vercel is worth considering if you are looking for a platform that helps you take your business to the next (or nuxt ;P) level. For the no-code user, it is an intuitive and simple tool with a bunch of features that help you and your team to launch new features fast.

Also, Vercel is a perfect match for headless ecommerce - it may help you reduce implementation and maintenance costs.

Combining it with a great software agency will lead you to nothing but success!