5 technology benefits of PWA, a headless storefront on Adobe Magento

PWA, React, and API-driven storefronts send fewer data between the server and the user and cache it with better efficiency. Also, modern frontend technology such as React improves user interaction experience even in slow network conditions by means of granular loading and caching of individual page components.

Currently, almost 100% of sites on the internet render an entire web page on the server (server-side rendering or SSR) and send it to the user as a big piece of design and data. PWA and headless change this approach to client-side rendered (CSR) pages where we first send the site's designs to the user's device and then inject the bits of requested data into the design template rendering the resulting page on the client side.

This is how mobile apps work: you first download empty layouts and then start requesting data from the server. Now this is available on the web with PWA—the feeling of a mobile app that is always present never gives you a blank screen, and can load data in smaller bits so that your experience is always interactive and consistent.

PWA and headless are API-driven, so it is much easier to integrate any 3rd-party API service, be it personalization service, search, image optimization, or real-time stock or price updates.

React-based API-driven storefront allows you to deploy your site, which is now an app, to Apple and Google app stores. Instead of a multi-month effort, it will be a maximum of a few weeks to prepare it for deployment. A big advantage is that you only need to maintain a single code base across all the channels!

Everybody says this. And we have seen it with our own eyes—we have integrated React PWA storefronts for more than 50 customers running Adobe Magneto and seen conversions increase from up to 7-12.5% on desktop and 10-34% on mobile.

HTML, CSS, Ajax, and JavaScript were invented in the desktop-first era and are optimized for these devices. React, PWA, SPA, and headless have been created to bridge the gap in user experience between desktop and mobile. Now we use them to address the challenges of the mobile-first consumer world and make the shopping experience of mobile-first users comfortable.

While Google ranking algorithms are not public, we have seen in more than 50 launched PWA projects that an increase in speed is usually coupled with a significant improvement in organic ranking positions on Google. Organic traffic from search engines shows an increase from 7.5% to 27.5% for our customers after integrating PWA into their stores.

If your technology stack is modern, it is much easier to attract the best talent and explore modern microservices-based architectures. Decoupling of the frontend and backend also helps to optimize the total cost of ownership facilitating the switch of the backend platform, being much less dependent on it. Monolith platforms are good and still do an amazing job, but eventually, these will become hard to maintain. Also, the innovation in the eCommerce space will be connectable with API-driven headless solutions, and merchants running on monolith may fall behind or simply spend more time and money on integrations.

Since 2019, we've launched more than 50 projects on Adobe Magento with React PWA storefront—from niche merchants to brands with catalogs in excess of 100K SKUs migrating to PWA from SAP Hybris. Puma, Monin, 6thStreet, aden + anais are among the eCommerce businesses we brought to PWA and headless. Each journey had its own unpredictable situations, but now we are familiar with most of them, and our PWA integration service promises expected business results within the planned time and budget.

In 2020, we made probably the biggest open-source contribution to the Adobe Magento ecosystem since Magento itself. We open-sourced a React-based theme and storefront for Magento working as a headless PWA—called ScandiPWA. And since its release, it has been the choice of brands such as Puma, Adidas, Levi's, Shure, and 6thStreet. We continue to lead React and PWA practice in the Adobe and Magento space, remaining as the team that maintains and advances ScandiPWA products as well as engages with its active community of adopters.

The reason for the lowest cost is simple—we have developed more than 50 sites on PWA and have more than 100 ready-to-use extensions as well as themes to save considerable amounts of developer and QA time. We also built the platform to run Adobe Magento and PWA sites, and it's called readymage.com. This platform provides development and production environments for Adobe Magento with a PWA storefront with just one click, saving weeks of DevOps time. By open-sourcing ScandiPWA and launching readymage.com, we've made exotic, exclusive, and expensive enterprise-only PWA solutions available to everybody, and we continue to champion this trend.

As PWA integration essentially means changing your frontend completely, why don’t we couple it with a redesign? We usually do!

It saves costs, as you do not need to pay for coding your existing design in React, PWA, and then changing it and coding again. Use our data and conversion-driven design process and get the same great business results we have achieved for our other customers.

Our cross-service delivery platform helps you reach business goals by contributing from different competence centers such as technology, SEO, UX and UI, data & analytics, and marketing. In the end, none of our customers needs just “PWA”; they look for remarkable business results that are achieved by combining multiple competencies in the focal point—frontend and user journey.

Our guarantee of the lowest cost also comes with a commitment to shorter development time as we can build your projects from many ready-available blocks. While our process saves you time and money, it also brings better quality as these solutions have been seen to work and tested on at least a few dozens of Adobe Magento PWA projects already delivered. While some PWA technology is still a new journey full of first learnings, we know what to plan for and have out-of-the-box solutions and automation at hand to speed up delivery.