In 2019, a website loading in 3 seconds was perfectly acceptable. Google hadn’t made Core Web Vitals a ranking factor. ChatGPT didn’t exist. Mobile usage hadn’t passed desktop. In five years, expectations, technology and behavior have changed at a pace the industry has never seen before. What a good website needs to do in 2026 differs fundamentally from what was enough in 2019.
Performance as competitive advantage: sub-1s is the new normal
Modern web technology — frameworks like Next.js, edge computing and server-side rendering — makes it possible to build websites that load lightning-fast no matter where in the world the visitor is. It’s no longer a premium feature reserved for big companies with big budgets. It’s standard.
Core Web Vitals, Google’s metrics for web performance, measure three things: LCP (how quickly the most important content renders), INP (how quickly the page responds to interaction) and CLS (how stable the layout is). All three have been ranking factors in Google’s algorithm since 2021, and all three directly affect conversion.
Speed is the ultimate competitive advantage. Users have been trained by the best sites on the internet to expect sub-second load times. Anything slower feels broken.
Guillermo Rauch, CEO Vercel, 2024
- Nordmalingshus: Lighthouse 100/100/100/100 across all four categories
- Solelexperten: load time under 0.8 seconds on mobile
- Nordmalingsmarknad: support for 5 languages including RTL (Arabic) with no performance hit
The CMS revolution: edit content without calling a developer
Sanity CMS is a headless content management system — a modern alternative to legacy editorial interfaces. It means content owners can edit text, swap images, add new pages and publish news directly in an intuitive interface, without technical knowledge.
The difference from WordPress is fundamental. In WordPress the CMS is tied to the presentation layer — change something and you risk breaking the design. In a headless system, content and design are completely separated. You can edit freely without risk, and we can update the design without touching your content.
Sanity also offers live preview, scheduled publishing and multilingual support — features that in the WordPress world require expensive plugins with their own security risks.
Integration and automation: when everything connects
A modern web platform isn’t an isolated website. It’s a hub in an ecosystem. For Johanna Forsberg we integrate the website with Shopify for ecommerce, with a custom CRM for customer management, and with Resend for email delivery. All in one system, with one login, and with data flowing automatically.
For Nordmalingsmarknad the website handles ticket sales, exhibitor registration, email sends and internal admin — all in one and the same platform. The alternative would have been a dozen separate SaaS tools with their own subscriptions, logins and integration problems.
- Payments via Stripe — built in, no extra platform
- Booking system via Cal.com — customers book directly, no email ping-pong
- Telephony via Rinkel — call logging directly in the CRM
- Email via Resend — transactional and newsletter without per-subscriber cost
- Analytics via Google Analytics 4 — full insight without cookie problems
Ecommerce without compromise: Shopify headless
Standard Shopify is good but limited in design and performance. Shopify headless — where we build a custom Next.js frontend connected to Shopify as the backend — gives you the best of both worlds: Shopify’s robust commerce engine with all payment integrations, and the freedom to design exactly the experience you want.
The result is an ecommerce platform that loads faster, converts better and looks exactly like your brand — not like a standard Shopify template that all your competitors are also using.
The brands winning in e-commerce are not the ones with the best products. They are the ones with the fastest, most frictionless buying experience.
Tobias Lütke, CEO Shopify, 2024