All statistics provided in this article are from this Forbes article.
Websites that load slowly cost retailers $2.6 billion U.S. dollars in sales each year
When you build the front end of your website directly into Shopify, WordPress, Drupal, SquareSpace, Wix, etc, page speed is limited by the inherent architecture of the system. Essentially, the front end and back end are competing for compute resources, your theme has a bunch of junk in the output search engines have to sort through to index the page, and no matter how much you optimize it, you’re upside is limited.
In the web development industry we refer to this architecture as a monolith. A monolith is when the front end and back end are built into the same code base. It’s like if a fighter jet had a passenger cabin and a luggage compartment. Even if you disallowed passengers and luggage, you’re still carrying an extra load.
Headless has the front end built separately from the back end, allowing the front end to only include the bare necessities: Javascript, API calls, and HTML (aka – the JAM stack). Simply put, this is the best possible architecture for page speed, performance, security, SEO, ADA, flexibility, scalability, etc (aka – all the stuff that actually matters).
47% of users won’t wait longer than two seconds for a website to load
40% of users will leave a site if take more than three seconds to load
61% say that if they don’t find what they’re looking for within about five seconds, they’ll go to another site
– Forbes
88% of online users won’t return to a site after a bad experience
Big tech websites like Google, Amazon, etc, have been headless for 15+ years. Only recently has the technology evolved to the point that it can be used for a typical website.
The front end is consuming the content via API, which provides a lot of advantages:
- Super fast page speed
- Best in Class
- Better landing pages
