Why We Build Marketing Sites with Phoenix Framework

When most people think of agency websites, they think WordPress. It’s the safe choice — ubiquitous, familiar, and with a plugin for everything. But “safe” and “optimal” aren’t the same thing.

At iMORPHr, we build our own sites (and our clients’ sites) with Phoenix Framework, an Elixir-based web framework. Here’s why.

The Performance Argument

Google’s Core Web Vitals directly impact search rankings. The three core metrics — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — are all measurable proxies for real user experience.

Phoenix-powered sites routinely achieve:

• LCP under 1.5s — Server-side rendering means the full HTML arrives quickly, without waiting for JavaScript to hydrate
• Near-zero CLS — Static content with explicit image dimensions eliminates layout shifts
• Sub-millisecond server response times — The BEAM (Erlang VM) that Phoenix runs on is extraordinary at handling concurrent requests with minimal latency

Server-Side Rendering: What It Means for SEO

Search engine crawlers still struggle with JavaScript-heavy single-page applications. When a Googlebot visits a React or Next.js page, it sometimes sees an empty shell while JavaScript loads.

With Phoenix’s controller-rendered views, every page response is complete, fully-rendered HTML. There’s nothing for search engines to wait for.

NimblePublisher: Blog Posts as Code

For content-heavy sites, we use NimblePublisher to compile Markdown files into the application at build time. Blog posts are stored in priv/posts/ as Markdown files with YAML frontmatter.

This approach means:

• Zero database overhead for content retrieval
• Instant page loads — content is in memory at startup
• Version-controlled content — posts live in the git repository alongside code
• No CMS to secure or maintain

The Developer Experience

Elixir is a joy to write. Its pattern matching, pipe operators, and functional approach make code highly readable and maintainable. The Phoenix Framework adds excellent conventions on top, so there’s rarely a question of “how should I structure this?”

Isn’t WordPress Good Enough?

For many use cases, yes. But for an agency that cares deeply about performance, SEO, and long-term maintainability, the overhead of WordPress — security updates, plugin conflicts, database queries for every page load — adds up.

Phoenix gives us a lean, fast, and resilient foundation. And when you’re building a marketing site whose primary job is to rank in Google and convert visitors, performance isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the whole game.