The importance of choosing the right tech stack for your digital project

A successful digital project starts with selecting the right technology.

Imagine tackling a DIY project in your home with only the cheapest and easiest-to-find materials. While it might get the job done quickly and on a tight budget, chances are you’ll end up redoing it and fixing things within months – or even weeks.

Forgive the imperfect analogy, but any digital project will go the same way if you don’t select the right technology to build it with and on. Make misguided decisions at the start of the project, and you’ll constantly be working and reworking to put things right.

In this post, we’re talking tech stacks, covering:

• What is a tech stack?
• Why selecting the right tech stack matters
• The potential pitfalls of choosing the wrong tech stack
• The value of having an expert partner to help you select the right tech stack

What is a tech stack?

A tech stack, or technical stack, is the combination of languages, frameworks, tools and technologies used to build, manage, and maintain your website or digital product.

Broadly, the three key components that make up your tech stack are as follows:

• Frontend – also known as “client-side” or “presentation layer” – technologies used to deliver what the user sees and interacts with, such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
• Backend – also known as “server-side” or “application layer” – web frameworks, programming languages, servers and operating systems that handle requests that come from the client-side (frontend).
• Database – also known as “data layer” – stores application data such as user, pricing or product data.

All of this is brought together to create the best possible experience for both you and your users. Enabling you to provide an elevated frontend experience, but also seamlessly manage content, automate processes, and to more easily develop and launch new experiences to add to the ecosystem.

Why does it matter?

Choosing the right tech stack is vital because it directly affects the performance, flexibility and manageability of your website or digital product now. However, getting this stage can lead to longer-term issues, such as higher costs and limited scalability.

The short-term

The short-term implications of your tech stack selection are as follows:

• Performance: your stack influences how fast, responsive and reliable your website or application is able to be for the user, particularly if you’re handling a lot of data.
• Functionality: at its core, your tech stack must enable your website or digital product to do what it needs to – having the required functionality and features to meet the needs of your organisation and your users.
• Security: according to Verizon, web application breaches account for 25% of all security breaches. Having a tech stack that’s suitably secure should be a priority from the offset, particularly if you’re storing and processing sensitive and business-critical data.

Introducing technical debt

In the mid to long-term, compromising on how you set up your tech stack initially leads to something called technical debt. Technical or tech debt is essentially the price you pay later for making “quick and dirty” decisions now. This usually means opting for off-the-shelf solutions which might offer everything you need now, and more quickly than a custom development, but will vastly reduce your options later, so when you want to grow your website or digital product, you end up spending more time and resources on development.

Selecting the right tech stack from the beginning reduces your tech debt and enables:

• Scalability: you’re set up to handle both technical and strategic growth – i.e. you can handle uplifts and spikes in traffic whilst also being able to support seamless growth and integration with new applications and systems.
• Faster development cycles: the reward you get for more time spent building the right thing in the right way upfront is being able to do things quicker later. Having the right foundation enables you or a partner like Adaptable to more quickly develop and roll-out new experiences within your ecosystem, without having to do a load of reworking.
• Cost-efficiency: ultimately, keeping tech debt to a minimum reduces the required investment in your website or digital product over its lifetime (also known as total cost of ownership or TCO). Investing in the right solution upfront means you can prioritise budget on new features and functionality in the future, rather than redeveloping (or in some cases, fixing) what you already have.

Tech debt in action

Recently, we worked with a large US homebuilder brand to audit their setup across six websites in their group. It was clear that these six websites had been spun up as and when the group and their offerings grew overtime. We identified several potential security vulnerabilities, inconsistencies, unused functionality and plugins, and unmanageable code. Our proposal and recommendations to them included steps to reduce technical debt, improve security and bring all of the websites under the same framework.

The value of having an expert partner

Technology evolves rapidly – you might be familiar with or currently using a particular solution or technology you feel is a good fit, but you might not be aware of a better solution. As mentioned earlier, off-the-shelf solutions can be tempting to opt for due the minimal upfront investment of time and budget required. However, in the long run this can be massively detrimental to your strategy and your ability to achieve your goals. Partnering with an expert who has the knowledge and experience to recommend the best solution sets you up for long-term success.

For Adaptable, selecting the tech stack is a vital part of the project planning process.

How we choose your tech stack

Through the discovery process, we drill down into your goals, the needs of your organisation, who your internal and external users are, and what systems you need to integrate with (if any). We take all of the information we extract from you during this process and use it to propose a tech stack that will be the best technical and strategic fit. We use our knowledge and experience of existing solutions and typical tech stacks and combine that with in-depth research into any third-party systems to recommend the best solution. We’ll always endeavour to propose a solution that’s achievable within your expected budget or timeline, but we’ll advise if what you’re trying to achieve simply isn’t possible – rather than incurring that dreaded tech debt.

Want to set your digital project up for success from the start? Get in touch to discuss how we could help you set off on the right path.