Swiftrics is a website platform I built, and it is not a hypothetical case study: the site you are reading right now runs on it. So does swiftrics.com itself, and so does nomadsamor.com, the travel site my wife Fabiola and I keep while we travel the country.
What it is
Swiftrics is a platform for building and publishing websites. You assemble pages out of components, things like rich text blocks, images, and video embeds, and organize articles into sections with categories and tags. Every change starts life as a draft. When you publish, the whole site is exported as plain static HTML, and those flat files are what visitors actually get. There is no database lookup or server-side rendering sitting between a reader and the page.
The thinking behind it
Most small business websites are a handful of pages and a blog. My view is that serving those as static files is the right default: the pages load fast, and there is no runtime stack to patch or babysit. I make the longer version of that argument on the Swiftrics blog, including a piece on static HTML versus WordPress and what the numbers actually show, alongside comparison pages against WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace. If you want the full pitch, swiftrics.com is the place to read it.
What it does day to day
The pieces I lean on most across my own sites:
- A component-based page editor, with layouts and rules about which components can nest inside which.
- Blog sections with categories and tags, so articles land on listing pages without any manual wiring.
- A media library for image uploads, plus per-page thumbnail and hero images that feed the blog cards.
- Video embeds for YouTube and Vimeo that render as responsive players in the static export.
- A draft-first workflow. Nothing goes live until a publish run regenerates the static site.
Running my own sites on it is also how it improves. When I hit a gap while publishing real content, I am both the annoyed user and the developer who can fix it, usually the same day.
The API
Everything the editor can do is also available through a REST API: creating pages, uploading media, managing categories and tags, and triggering publishes. That turns out to matter more than it sounds. Content workflows can be automated end to end, and mine are: articles for my sites are drafted as markdown, converted to components, posted through the API, and published the same way. Most of what I write never touches the visual editor. This page got here exactly like that.
Where it fits
Swiftrics is in closed beta right now, powering my own web properties while the product hardens in production. It is the platform half of a pattern that runs through my work: build the tool, then run real things on it until it holds up. You can see the rest of that pattern on my projects page, and if you want to talk about Swiftrics, or about a site that should be running on it, head to the contact page.