STOREFRONT X – the fastest PWA of today

Introducing STOREFRONT X!

StoreFront X is currently the fastest frontend PWA solution for Magento 2 that will significantly improve your UX and increase your conversion rate, up to 20%. It combines the benefits of a classic SSR web app and a modern PWA app while replacing the native mobile app.

The idea of creating a custom PWA framework came while searching for a suitable solution for our Magento 2 enterprise clients. None of the existing frameworks met our expectations and that’s why we came up with the vision of StoreFront X. Since we are convinced that PWA is the future of e-commerce, the thousands of hours of work were worth it.

Who is Storefront X for?

StoreFront X is for companies that have their e-commerce business built on Magento 2. It is ideal for clients with complex e-commerce stores who are constantly working on business performance improvement.

How does StoreFront X work?

StoreFront X is a framework and library for creating modern frontends for Magento 2. It is built from the ground up to be both easy to customize and powerful. The StoreFront X architecture is therefore modular – it consists of a very small core and additional modules for individual functionalities. Therefore, the customer is not forced into some unsatisfactory default solution, but everything can be customized directly.

A great advantage of this architecture solution is also the positive impact on performance, one of the most important factors that an e-shop operator should monitor. Our goal was to make StoreFront X fast, smooth, without hiccups and long load times. Therefore, we carefully thought through each functionality in terms of its impact on performance.

Why does StoreFront X support full server-side rendering (SSR)? Because it also has a positive impact on speed and better SEO. When a browser makes an initial query, it returns fully rendered HTML that it can display immediately. That makes the page load very quickly for the customer. For example, PWA Studio or Scandi PWA can’t do this, so the initial HTML is empty and a lot of JavaScript has to be loaded to display something. From an indexing perspective, this is a much more efficient solution – it is less computationally intensive and cheaper. In general, the big e-com players still rely on rendered HTML.

That brings us to the impact on business, which is increased conversion rates. You can find a lot of studies on the web about what effect initial loading speed has on conversion rate (like the one here from Deloitte). Therefore, speed and ease of use are one of the main things StoreFront X focuses on. When a customer opens StoreFront X for the first time, they need to see it fully loaded and functional within two seconds.

Why is StoreFront X better than other PWA frameworks?

• Speed
  Instead of talk, real results are better. And it’s not just about speed. StoreFront X outperforms other frameworks in all Lighthouse Performance Score metrics see below. If you’re wondering how your site is performing, try this tool.

• Better SEO
  Thanks to server-side rendering, StoreFront X has better SEO, loads faster, and “works” even on older browsers or browsers where JavaScript is disabled.

• Built specifically for Magento
  StoreFront X is built from the ground up exclusively for Magento, making it more efficient. Like Magento, StoreFront X offers absolute freedom to customize almost any part. Magento developers therefore automatically know how to proceed without having to read the documentation.

• Easy usability
  StoreFront X avoids unnecessary complexity and robust code. For example, the code displaying a category in StoreFront X is a few dozen lines long. In Vue Storefront and PWA Studio, it has hundreds to thousands of lines because it has to account for many different factors (the framework is for multiple backends, etc.). Development, scaling, and maintenance are therefore easier than with other frameworks.

• Scalability
  StoreFront X is a simple yet highly customizable and extensible solution thanks to its modular architecture at its core. It is easy to overload any part of StoreFront X or any module. In PWA Studio, overloading is unnecessarily complicated and tedious, in Vue Storefront it has a negative impact on performance. Overloading in StoreFront X works by removing the old code and not allowing it to enter the browser. In other PWAs this is not the case, leading to slower page load times and worse SEO (see Core Web Vitals).

Join us as we talk about how StoreFront X can help take your business up a few levels.