One of the benefits of the Jamstack is to go serverless, then we don’t need to worry about maintaining the server.

But hey, there’s also serverless PHP, like Laravel’s Vapor, and Bref. If WordPress can get serverless, then it can attain the most important benefits of the Jamstack, without leaving its comfort zone of relying on dynamic code via PHP, and being a monolith.

With serverless PHP, you got covered the “no webhosting needed” part, and your hosting bill will get down to cents per month. (You still need a server for the DB, that’s unavoidable)

And the “serve from a CDN to make the site faster” part can be achieved nowadays, without having to deploy static files to a CDN. Just route the site through AWS Cloudfront and, the first time the page is accessed, Cloudfront can pull the content from the origin server, and serve it from its cache from then on. Have Cloudfront ignore the routes for the WP REST API endpoints, and you access dynamic functionality too (eg: post comments, and then lazy-load them)

So the most important confrontation (if there is one) is not really between WordPress and the Jamstack. It’s more between WordPress and WordPress: how can WordPress provide support for these amazing new features, which are really just around the corner?

Instead of emulating the Jamstack, WordPress will get better results, and way faster, by emulating Laravel. Adopting modern PHP practices (bumping up min PHP version, adopting Composer, using autoloading, using PHP Standards Recommendations) could take WordPress a long way to getting several of the benefits from the Jamstack, with minimal effort.