Headless Magento – A complete guide

Amongst the heading eCommerce trends that are expected to dominate the digital world in times to come, Headless commerce is one.

Headless Magento is the most popular contribution by the Magento Community to bring about exceptional user experiences in the eCommerce industry. Headless Magento has arrived and is here to stay, making an impact for both B2B and B2C businesses.

Headless eCommerce is essentially the decoupling of the front-end and the back-end of your eCommerce website, which communicates via requests and retrieving data via APIs. 

The move from a monolithic approach offers opportunities to integrate various solutions to meet your brand needs, as well as the benefits outlined above.

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What is headless eCommerce, and why go headless?

Consumer shopping nature is changing all the time – when in the past, buyers would have purchased directly from a desktop site, now users consume content through a host of interfaces including tablets, Android phones, in-car technology (to one extreme), and much more. 

If you’re looking to get the best-in-class mobile UX, have complicated needs around the front-end of your site, or are generally invested in providing a rich UX across all platforms, then headless may be the excellent choice for you.

The advantages of a headless approach mean exceptional flexibility, significantly enhanced performance, and the ability to tailor content and extraordinary user experience to customers. 

The separation of the front-end and back-end also means that some modifications to your website can be done without having to worry about back-end development, as you would have to have implemented in the past, meaning higher agility.

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Magento – The headless solution

Magento is an excellent choice for headless on paper – it’s highly extensible, and it’s often associated with performance problems/slower load times, and even small front-end development jobs can be profoundly affected by the back-end of the platform. 

These are the topmost reasons that Magento organizations utilize – giving them and the merchant for agility on the front-end and much quicker load times.

There are already different options available for the front-end/presentation layer with Magento, with the most common ones presently being –

• Headless CMS

With other mediums, solutions like Prismic or Contentful are widely utilized, but this hasn’t been as much the case with Magento. This is becoming more popular, and some of the renowned sites developing headless sites at the moment are adopting these. Made.com is an excellent example of a massive Magento site building a headless website utilizing Prismic as a headless CMS.

• Third-party framework

There are various new frameworks popping up around Magento (and other platforms). Still, the most popular utilized ones are VueStorefront and Deity. 

VueStorefront has been executed by various renowned Magento sites and is developing a strong community and ecosystem around it.

• Bespoke

Lots of organizations/programmers are building out their frameworks, which can then be utilized across various projects. Most of these are based on the latest javascript frameworks, such as React.js or Vue.js. The disadvantage for a merchant is that they’re semi-locked in with an organization, as the solution is mostly proprietary.

• PWA Studio

Magento’s framework that’s being developed around the platform to enable customers to build stores as progressive web apps. This is very trending but something to keep an eye on as it’s supported by Magento (with lots of community involvement) and is likely to be strongly integrated. It’s also developed solely for Magento, unlike most other choices.

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Why is Magento a good fit?

Magento is completely fit for the back-end of a headless build, be it via a separate framework or a headless CMS.

The only thing to remember is that not every Magento characteristic has fully developed out APIs (as with an API-first platform or some of the more headless-focused platforms), which can provide additional development work.

Magento’s page builder or content staging and preview are the best features that fall under this. This, along with the different development overheads, are the only counter-argument to going headless with Magento. 

However, lots of developers who have been developing headless Magento sites utilizing their framework for a long time) have overcome this and have acquired additional parts or started connecting other solutions (like Contentful, for example) to enhance affected areas.

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Prominent examples

Here we present to you some of the most prominent examples of websites which used headless Magento for their designing and working.

• Zadig & Voltaire

This has been one of the latest examples of the successful implementation of headless Magento, making use of the popular VueStorefront framework. The firm has been talking a lot about their recent shift to the advanced technology and all their gratitude was towards headless Magento.

• Biscuiteers

Here is another example of a venture which presented gratitude towards headless Magento for its boosted speed in the working and taking the orders.

• Eleganza

Eleganza is a high-end menswear brand portrayed professionally and fascinatingly on the web with the help of headless Magento. Using headless Magento has made the site fast and easy-to-use.

• UK Meds

UK Meds have an ultimately complex functionality and have a diverse range of products. To tackle this difficulty, headless Magento came to the rescue. With its help, the storefront has been tailored according to the customer’s specific needs.

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Why choose MagnoStack?

At MagnoStack, we undertake Magento projects that are open-source in nature and also support community contributions and collaborations.

Our team of highly skilled professionals provides customized Magento services to help you reap maximum profits from this robust platform. We provide you with expertise in this project to improve the experience and engagement of the users.

Not only this, but our highly professional Magento developers are also assisted in a better way through Progressive Web App Studio because it has exceptionally substituted the conventional way of executing the front of the store in a more dynamic and adaptable manner.