Not every “website” is the same system. Treating a conversion-led marketing surface like a multi-tenant product (or the reverse) creates cost you feel months later.
Three common shapes
1. Marketing / content site
- Mostly public pages
- SEO, performance, and editorial workflow dominate
- Light forms, not deep authenticated product state
2. Product application
- Auth, roles, dashboards, and mutable domain data
- SEO often secondary (except for public marketing slices)
- Reliability and permissioning dominate
3. Hybrid
Many companies need both: a public narrative and an authenticated product. Hybrids work when boundaries are explicit — shared design system, separate data sensitivity, clear routing.
Decision cues
Choose (or split) based on:
- Who is logged in, and what they can change
- Whether crawlability is a growth channel
- How often non-engineers must publish content
- Whether failure modes are “page down” or “wrong tenant data”
What we recommend in practice
For modern TypeScript teams, a Next.js-centered stack can serve marketing and product — but only with deliberate route groups, caching rules, and auth boundaries. Our web development work starts by naming the jobs the web surface must do, then choosing architecture that keeps those jobs honest.
