About

Learn more about Fixture.

Fixture is built by Matthew Smith in Manchester, MO.  Fixture is the first production serverless CMS.  Fixture sites are built using static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript deployed to your own Amazon S3 buckets.  This gives you full control over how you build out and scale your site.

Our Philosophy

What is Fixture (https://fixture.app)? What makes it different from the 1,000+ other website building solutions? Why would you choose Fixture over Wordpress or Squarespace? These are all great questions that I spent a lot of time thinking about even before writing a single line of code. I came up with the following key pillars of Fixture.

  • Fixture is serverless.  Why should you care how a solution is built? Well, it turns out that it matters a lot. Fixture uses only AWS serverless solutions: DynamoDB, Lambda, Cognito, S3, and SES. It benefits from all the reliability and security of these solutions. And, there is no mystery architecture sitting between your desk and your site.
  • Fixture gives you back control. Fixture allows you to store your site in your own bucket. By adding Cloudfront and Route53 on top of your bucket, you have a fully SSL secured solution with a high quality CDN for just a few bucks a month. The best part of the whole solution is that you completely control the bucket. You can replicate it, back it up, sync it to another bucket, and control access.
  • Fixture is fast. The Fixture website (https://fixture.app) runs completely on Fixture. It scores a 99 on performance for Lighthouse and renders the first paint in under 1.7 seconds. This is not by accident. Fixture was built from the ground-up to be really fast. It does this by producing minimal code to display the site, rendering the site in static HTML to minimize request processing, and putting it all behind an ultra-fast CDN.
  • Fixture is affordable. Coming from the open-source world, I appreciate the need to make a solution cost-effective. A lot of developers and designers that use my open source products do so because they cost less than traditional website SAAS solutions. That is why I set pricing on Fixture to start at just a few bucks a month. Pairing Fixture with AWS will often result 25-40% savings over a traditional website builder.
  • Fixture is beautiful and easy-to-use. While beauty is often in the eyes of the beholder, I built Fixture so that it is beautiful and easy-to-use. I enjoy using it everyday to maintain my own sites. And, I do believe that other will enjoy using it as much as they have with my previous products.

How we got started

I have been building website tools for over 10+ years.  My most popular tool is an open source CMS named Respond CMS.  Fixture started as an offshoot of Respond in 2018 meant to test two ideas:  (1) can we make a CMS that is 100% serverless and (2) can we improve the overall speed of sites built with a CMS.  After validating that it is in fact possible to build a completely serverless CMS, Fixture took aim at the web site builder industry that has been increasingly building slower and slower websites.  As of our release on March 16, 2019, Fixture websites are over 5 times faster than websites built by the "big" website builders.  And, Fixture runs without servers on the AWS serverless stack.  Mission accomplished.

What's with the name?

So, the Fixture name really doesn't mean anything.   In the US, a fixture is a name for a permanent light.  But I honestly just liked how the name sounded and I think it sounded fast.  I wanted the name of the builder to be synonymous with fast.  So, that is the origin of the name.