Running a website doesn’t necessarily require a big-time investment, but for companies that wish to roll out enhancements continuously and minimize loading times, it can be a major undertaking. Netlify Inc. is working to reduce the amount of manual effort involved in the task.

Today, the startup announced that it has secured a $12 million round of funding led by venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz to pursue this mission. Netlify’s vision centers on a homegrown platform that essentially aims to do for website development what Git did for software version control.

Developed by Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Git lets programmers release changes to project with only a few commands. Netlify makes it possible to update a website in a similar fashion without worrying about the numerous steps that must be performed as part of the process. When a developer releases new code, the startup’s platform automatically takes care of the heavy lifting using an integrated content delivery network.

Netlify pushes out only changed web pages to avoid unnecessary overhead. From there, the old content is quickly replaced by a speedy cache management function that the startup said can apply an update in under a second. It also provides the ability to undo a modification just as smoothly in the event of an error. 

For users, Netlify delivers web pages in a prepared form that removes the need to render the same content upon every visit. The startup claims that its approach allows for faster loading than traditional methods while reducing the risk from certain types of cyberattacks.

The catch is that Netlify only supports sites that are fairly static at their core. As a result, developers must integrate with an external service when they wish to implement advanced features such as a search bar or shopping cart. But this constraint doesn’t pose too big of a challenge since the average site already relies heavily on third parties.

Netlify has won over more than 100,000 developers so far, including at companies such as Google Inc., Facebook Inc., NBC and the Mozilla Foundation. Today’s funding will help the startup keep spreading the word about its platform.

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