Skywire CTO and development wizard Mr Alex Judd muses on the subject of ‘headless’ web development and what it means for your online business.

There’s been quite a bit of buzz in the eCommerce market about ‘Headless’ and ‘PWA’ [Progressive Web Apps] in recent months but what does it really mean for you the store owner and manager?

Going ‘Headless’ basically gives you more freedom to choose the best tools for your business and your customers, rather than the traditional one solution has to fit all. No longer do you have to shoe-horn your requirements around the platform and hope that it will just get better with future releases or when your chosen platform supplier decides to release more updates. For example: Want to use WordPress’s Gutenberg editor with Magento to edit your content, and present it using a super snazzy Progressive Web App front-end? Not a problem.

The reason for this is that all of the platforms have started to adopt what has been termed a ‘Headless’ approach to their platform allowing you to decouple the front-end of the platform from the back-end and pick the best of both.

A bit like Gweneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, there has been a ‘Conscious Uncoupling’ in the eCommerce platform market in the last 18 months which means you can choose not just the platform that you want, but also the admin system you prefer, and the presentation technology you like such as mobile-optimized frameworks like Vue and React, (*I won’t lecture on how much of your traffic will be mobile in the future if not today).

So use your head, pick what you want as best of breed from the market, and spend your time on Marketing and Sales rather than fighting your eCommerce platform!

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