If your business can’t adapt, your business can’t compete.
In the fast-paced world of business, adaptability is the key to success. Unfortunately, most turn-key website platforms have a hidden flaw – they are inherently limited in their potential. As your business grows, your unique needs may diverge from what your vendor’s monolithic platform can offer, resulting in a system that does many things but excels at none.
To achieve peak performance and outshine competitors, your business needs a well-coordinated team where every piece works together seamlessly. In the realm of systems, this translates to leveraging architectural patterns that prioritize modularity, scalability, and adaptability. Headless, composable architectures are helping businesses select best-of-breed products and compose them into a system that aligns with business goals.
The good news is that adopting this style of architecture has never been easier. With dozens of frameworks to choose from and robust platform support, transitioning to a headless or composable architecture might be the game-changer your business needs.
What is a composable architecture?
While traditional, monolithic website architectures rely on a single, tightly integrated codebase, composable architecture takes a different approach. It modularizes elements, favoring individual services-based building blocks that can be maintained, scaled, upgraded, and even swapped independently. These building blocks efficiently communicate using APIs, allowing for flexible integration.
Composable architectures go beyond “headless” systems. Not only do they decouple the frontend presentation from the backend system logic, but they also enable further composition of the backend systems. This decoupling reduces the effort required to engage consumers across new channels because individual systems can be reused, avoiding the need to start from scratch each time.
Benefits of composable architecture
Embracing a composable architecture empowers your business to compose building blocks with unparalleled flexibility, opening doors to new opportunities for innovation. By independently selecting the most suitable technologies for each layer, organizations can optimize performance, boost scalability, and readily adapt to emerging trends, resulting in highly engaging consumer experiences.
A significant advantage of composable architecture lies in its incremental and iterative approach. Your system can evolve organically, moving toward a more agile form, rather than undergoing a disruptive “big bang” transformation. This gradual progression allows for seamless adaptation and continuous improvement, keeping your business at the forefront of innovation. What comes after are the following benefits:
Flexibility: Composable architecture allows you to select and integrate best-of-breed components, tailoring solutions to specific needs and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Scalability: Each component can be independently scaled, ensuring efficient handling of varying workloads and seamless distribution of services.
User Experience: Composable architecture empowers you to quickly launch innovative user experiences, unencumbered by monolithic limitations.
Omni-Channel Support: APIs and services can be easily reused across platforms, enabling consistent experiences across different channels.
Conversion Rates: Faster load times lead to increased conversion rates as users are more likely to take desired actions on a fast-loading website.
Rapid Innovation: The modular nature of composable architectures fosters experimentation and rapid iteration, encouraging continuous innovation.
Overall Cost: Composable architectures build new features on existing infrastructure, reducing costs and accelerating the pace of innovation.
The industry shift toward composability
As the digital landscape rapidly evolves, businesses are reevaluating their system architectures. Composability has emerged as a key growth opportunity and a critical component of companies’ architecture roadmaps.
In 2020, the MACH Alliance was established to advocate for Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless (MACH) system architecture. Their 2023 annual research, conducted in collaboration with MEL Research, revealed that 85% of the 500 respondents have increased the percentage of MACH implementations within their infrastructure. Around 60% of them reported that composability enables faster responses to market changes, enhances customer experiences, and accelerates the development and implementation of new functionalities.
According to a 2022 State of Commerce report by Salesforce, organizations using headless architecture experience greater agility, enabling faster optimization of front-end experiences to meet diverse customer expectations and improve conversion rates. Notably, 80% of businesses without headless architecture currently plan to implement it within the next two years, recognizing its potential benefits.
The advantages of embracing composable architecture are undeniable. It fosters greater agility, customization capabilities, seamless integration, and the ability to explore new sales channels, ensuring continued success in the ever-evolving digital market. To thrive in this competitive landscape, companies must prioritize implementing innovative composable systems.
No matter where you are in your journey to composable architecture, Edgio can help. Our Expert Services team can support you in product and project management, technical architecture, front-end engineering, quality assurance, and testing support. We’ve helped customers, including Tapestry, Mars (M&Ms), and Shoe Carnival make the transition, and can do the same for you. If you’re ready to prepare your website for future demand, contact us today.
Digital Transformation