A modern marketing site without a modern front-end stack
Laravel 13, Blade, Tailwind 4, Vite 8. Astro, Hugo, Eleventy and Next are all good at building fast marketing sites. This is not a comparison, and there is no version of this article where one of them loses. Every one of those tools carries real advantages and real costs, and choosing between them is a question of context. This is our context, and these are our numbers. 4,323 bytes. Gzipped…
The article discusses a modern marketing website that is built without a modern front-end stack. The site is powered by Laravel 13, Blade templating, Tailwind 4, and Vite 8, showing that there are various tools available for building fast marketing sites. Each tool has its own advantages and costs, and the choice depends on the specific context.
The author's context includes a 4,323-byte gzipped JavaScript file, which includes navigation, the theme switcher, and audience measurement. Four modules are hand-coded without any frameworks.
The site achieves a PageSpeed score of 99 for performance and 100 for accessibility and SEO in a lab run on August 17, 2026. However, there are no data available from field tests, as the site is too new and not frequently visited. The article highlights four key differences that make this marketing site unique: no CDN, no asset domain, no front-end framework, and content stored in PostgreSQL instead of Markdown or a headless CMS.
The absence of a CDN means the apex domain and its www subdomain resolve directly to an OVH server, with no intermediate proxy or edge network. There is also no asset domain, meaning stylesheets, scripts, and fonts come from the same origin as the HTML, under the same cache policy and certificate.
The site does not use any front-end framework, with the 26 public views being Blade views. The 28 public routes go through a single-page application layer, and there is no second repository, pipeline, deployment model, or content drift. The build process consists of two entries, with one application holding a React product and a Blade public site. The Vite config declares separate entries, and the reason for this separation is to avoid paying for the entire app when a marketing page is shipped.
The production manifest shows that a complete public page, including navigation and interactions, is only 17.4 KB of compressed script and style. The JavaScript is compiled TypeScript with no framework, written specifically for what those pages need to do. The separation between the two entries is structural, not a convention that must be remembered.
Content is stored in PostgreSQL using Eloquent models in a Filament admin panel. Non-developers can edit articles, and the changes appear immediately without any rebuild or deploy. This approach allows the public site to access session data, enabling personalization based on the visitor's state without the need for an additional API or extra requests. This architecture eliminates the need for a design system package, synchronization steps, or any additional infrastructure costs.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
