Statamic 3 Resources & Tips

Last Updated 7/1/2020.

Statamic 3 is currently in beta, but it is already fantastic (this very website runs on Statamic 3)... and we're almost at the official launch.

Statamic 3 Beta Specific Info

You will need to manually run this command to update to the latest version of the beta

composer update statamic/cms --with-dependencies

Helpful Links

Mike Martin put together a super handy Trello board with the status of add-ons for Statamic 3.
Spock replacement from Duncan McClean to save changes from production back to repo.
Temporary SEO plugin until Aardvark SEO for Statamic 3 is released.

Hosting and Deployment

We use Laravel Forge to spin up our servers on Digital Ocean and deploy code to them from GitHub. Then we point the domain name through Cloudflare which gives use free SSL and some other benefits. We’re not overly excited about dev ops, so we’re happy to keep this straightforward and consistent.

Forge Deploy Script

cd /home/forge/www.claritysquared.com
git pull origin master
echo "" | sudo -S service php7.4-fpm reload

php please glide:clear
php please stache:clear
php please static:clear

Redirects

While there are some redirects that can be done within Statamic (Laravel), we found it was simpler to just do them through Forge since we had simple needs.

Making it Ridiculously Fast

Website performance is super important (we have written about how to make fast websites before). Here are a few Statamic 3 things to make your website blazing fast.

Responsive Images & Image Resizing

You can use the built-in Glide Tag to resize images. Or better yet, use this Responsive Images add-on to take care of this while also generating responsive versions of the images.

We opted for the Responsive Images add-on and are pleased to say it was super simple to set up. Here's the antlers code:

Static Caching

Using the built-in Static Caching will definitely make a big difference in your website's performance. Here are some hints on how to set this up (mainly just follow what is in the Statamic documentation).

We wanted to control the static caching in our .env file, so we updated the .env to include:

# Production
APP_CACHE_STRATEGY=full

# Dev
APP_CACHE_STRATEGY=null

Then we updated the config/statamic/static_caching.php file to use this to control if Static Caching was enabled or not. Change it from:

'strategy' => null,

to:

'strategy' => env('APP_CACHE_STRATEGY', null),

In our Forge Nginx Configuration we changed the location / (as is recommended in the Statamic documentation) to:

location / {
  try_files /static${uri}_${args}.html $uri /index.php?$args;
}

Lastly, be sure to check your website's performance (we recommend webpagetest.org and Google Page Speed Insights). This site is sub 2 seconds.

SEO

This was a bigger issue for us, and we don't have a perfect solution yet. The Aardvark SEO and SEO Pro add-ons are not yet released for Statamic 3.

For this website we built our own fields for SEO (title tags, meta descriptions, opengraph images, etc.). However, I came across this plugin and this gist that both offer basic SEO fields and may be worth checking out.