This website: every change checked before it goes live

The challenge

A consultancy's own site is the one piece of work every visitor sees, so it has to show the practice it describes: fast pages, honest numbers, tests that would catch a mistake, and releases that are routine rather than events. It also has to cost little to run and stay simple enough to change in an afternoon.

The approach

1. Built the site in Next.js and React and exported it as static pages, served from Azure Storage through Azure Front Door, with the contact form handled by an Azure Function. Terraform defines all of it, so the whole estate can be rebuilt from the repository.
2. Made every change pass the same gates before it can merge: formatting, type checks, lint with no warnings allowed, a ban on code comments, documentation that must match the scripts it describes, a check that no block of code is copied, unit tests at full coverage, and the browser tests against a production build.
3. Ran the checks on self-hosted runners, in parallel, and let a release reuse the build its pull request already checked, so a release only uploads files, refreshes the edge and moves on.
4. Ran every check before a release and none after it: a check against the live site could not stop a bad release, only report it once visitors had it.
5. Cut what each visit costs: fonts trimmed to the characters the site uses, artwork cached for a year under file names that change with the drawing, a service worker that answers a reload from its own cache, and a still contour hero in place of a 3D one once the page loaded fast enough that the swap showed.
6. Kept one home for every shared piece, from the calendar and money formatting the demos use to the form fields and page intros, so a fix in one place reaches every page that uses it.

The result

Measured in early October 2026, pull request checks took 297 s at the median, browser tests included, and a release of the site took 80 s at the median. The repository then held 2,372 unit tests at 100% coverage, and no block of 50 or more tokens is copied. The home page scores 100 in every Lighthouse category on mobile, and a reload downloads 0 KB before the page shows.