Why the stack choice matters
Your stack determines how fast you can ship, how well the site performs, how cheap it is to host, and how painful your SEO is. Picking badly is not catastrophic but it does cost you 3–12 months of compounding small frictions.
The default winner: Next.js
Next.js is the 2026 default for most startups. Server components, static generation, strong SEO primitives, a huge talent pool and a deep ecosystem. If someone is asking me "what stack?" with no other context, I say Next.js until I hear a reason not to.
The rising alternative: Astro
Astro shines for content-heavy marketing sites — blogs, documentation, brand sites with minimal interactive UI. It ships less JavaScript by default, which means better Core Web Vitals out of the box. If you are 90% content and 10% interactive, Astro is seriously worth considering.
CMS choices
Headless CMS has won. The leaders: Sanity (flexible, strong ecosystem), Payload (self-hosted, TypeScript-native), Strapi (open source, large community), Contentful (enterprise, polished, expensive). For most startups: Sanity or Payload. Skip Contentful unless you are at scale or enterprise.
Hosting and deployment
Vercel for Next.js is the path of least resistance. Netlify also works well. For Astro, Cloudflare Pages or Netlify. Self-hosting on a VPS (Hetzner, DigitalOcean) is cheaper but demands a competent ops person.
Analytics and product intelligence
GA4 is still required for ads and Google ecosystem integration, but its UX is rough. Plausible (privacy-friendly, cheap) or PostHog (product analytics + session replay) are strong complements. For experimentation, GrowthBook or Statsig.
What we would actually recommend for a new startup today
Web Accuracy's default recommendation for a pre-Series-B startup marketing site: Next.js 14+, Sanity CMS, Vercel hosting, PostHog analytics, Resend for transactional email, and a simple Figma design system. Everything else can wait.
Red flags in stack recommendations
Agencies that push Wix, Squarespace or Elementor-heavy WordPress are optimising for their own delivery cost, not your long-term performance. Agencies that push exotic stacks (Remix, SvelteKit, SolidJS) for a generic marketing site are optimising for engineer enthusiasm over hiring reality. Neither is wrong, both are suspicious.
Frequently asked
- Can I start on Wix or Squarespace and migrate later?Yes, but migrating is painful. If you already know the site will be a serious marketing asset, start on Next.js or Astro directly.
- Is React still the right choice in 2026?Yes. React is still the largest UI ecosystem by a wide margin, and Next.js keeps it on the performance frontier.
- Do I need TypeScript?For anything lasting more than 3 months, yes. The tooling is mature and the cost of plain JavaScript in medium-to-large codebases is now greater than the cost of TypeScript overhead.
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