How to Create a Corporate Website with Strapi

Strapi is a highly versatile, headless CMS—a perfect tool for developing complex applications with authentication and data structures, but also corporate websites primarily meant for presentation. Today, let's talk about main benefits and drawbacks of building a corporate website using Strapi and show how and why to do it.

While developing a website based on WordPress and using a template is simple, most such sites are generally non-unique and un-optimized in terms of performance and SEO, among other things. Good enough for startups that just mean to grab a presence real fast, but for an established corporation, more individual and thus better-optimized decisions must be made.

It's here that Strapi crushes the competition. Since it is API-based, you can use any front-end framework that works ideally for you. Third-party free plugins in the Strapi marketplace, like the SEO plugin, let you fine-tune every page on your website.

One drawback is that content creators lose their comfort with the typical CMS that all have WYSIWYG editors. But, yes, it does ensure that content creators use the components as the designer intended them to, to keep the content always structured in the same way and only swap the content.

Strapi will give you content by default for your website, but it will not create any front-end. Consequently, development time needs to be invested in this.

When selecting a framework, keep in mind that your website should be indexable by search engines, meaning that it should provide server-side rendering or static site generation.

There are so many of them: Next, Gatsby, Astro, Remix, Nuxt—that's not an all-inclusive list. If you're unsure which one to choose, Strapi has an excellent starter repository featuring Strapi/Next/Tailwind with 8 UI sections out of the box.

It's also good to see how many content types and components are playing along to create the proper data structure.

1. Customizability
   Strapi has excellent flexibility, providing your company with tailor-made solutions to fit its needs. While there are classic CMSs that might embrace you in some sort of framework or structure, Strapi lets you develop just what you need.
2. Performance Optimization
   This is made possible because with Strapi, you compose your front-end framework, and can optimize your API calls by all means. The ins and outs of all the possible disparate contexts under which Strapi ensures fast and high-performance results.
3. SEO Benefits
   Like with plugins, including the SEO plugin, you get to optimize per page for search engines, hence increasing the traffic to your website. This is very vital for corporate websites that have to keep a significant presence online.
4. Safety
   Strapi comes with solid security features. Being open-source, developers can review and add more security measures to ensure your corporate website remains secure.

1. Initial Setup and Learning Curve
   Strapi requires more setup effort than traditional CMS because that flexibility comes with a steeper learning curve, especially if your team isn't familiar at all with the strategies of headless CMS or API-driven development.
2. Content Management
   Content creators familiar with WYSIWYG editors may find Strapi's approach less intuitive than training and using content components perfectly tailored to their workflow.

1. Preplan Your Website Structure
   Before you start building, literally design the layout of your website. Determine what you will create : pages, blogs, case studies, etc. You will be able to adapt Strapi to support this.
2. Strapi Setup
   You can install Strapi, create your first administrator login, configure your database, and, after that, define content types that fit your website structure. These content types can be managed and edited in the Strapi administration panel.
3. Develop the Front End
   Choose one of the front-end technologies such that it should adhere to your previous considerations regarding performance and SEO needs. Built the front end, it fetches data from Strapi APIs and reflects this on your website.
4. Optimize for SEO
   Leverage the power of the Strappi SEO plugin and other available tools in optimizing the pages. Make meta tags, keywords, and descriptions clear and relevant.
5. Testing and deployment
   Thoroughly test your website on performance and business logic. Finally, deploy your frontend and Strapi CMS on reliable hosting services, like Vercel for the front end and any of Strapi Cloud, AWS, Azure, or Digital Ocean for the latter.
6. Launching Your Website
   After having perfected your website, now is the time to launch. Since Strapi is decoupled from the front end, both have to be deployed. Numerous options abound, which allow for deployment, and in many cases, almost all guides are provided in their respective front-end framework documentation.
   A good cheap option is deploying your front end to Vercel. You can quickly deploy Strapi on AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, Heroku, or many other services. One of the best solutions will be Strapi Cloud, which primarily will be developed by Strapi to host this CMS.

Here's a look at one of our case studies where we show, by practice, what is possible with Strapi. Learn more about how we helped one of the most significant Czech insurance companies regain complete control over their marketing sections by building for them a modular system for website personalization, and see how Strapi can deal with apparently complex requirements in a quality manner.

Notum is a highest-tier certified Strapi Agency.
We are based in Czechia and Switzerland. Ready to chat about your project.