Why You Should Build Your Website in React

There are more than 26 million eCommerce websites worldwide selling more than $4 trillion worth of products and services every year. In addition to the low barrier to entry into the eCommerce sector, the operating costs of running an eCommerce business are much lower than running a brick-and-mortar retail store, since you don’t need expensive storefronts or multiple warehouses to consistently supply different stores as your business grows. There are many recent examples of eCommerce businesses giving much more established brands a run for their money.

But as the eCommerce industry boomed and competition increased, the failure rate also increased exponentially. As of 2021, 90% of the eCommerce brands fail within the first four months of their operations according to Forbes. But why do so many eCommerce businesses fail?

If you google ‘why eCommerce businesses fail you will see that most of the sources will list reasons related to poor user experience and poor online marketing in the top 5 most common reasons for eCommerce ventures to fail. And this is where a website built in React can help businesses provide their users with the most updated eCommerce experience to date.

So, what is React? How does it improve the user experience of an eCommerce buyer?

React is a JavaScript library that was developed and is still maintained by Meta (formerly Facebook) as well as a large community of other companies and independent developers. It allows developers to build user interfaces for Single Page Applications (SPA). A SPA is a web-based application or a website that dynamically rewrites a single page with the new data from the server rather than the conventional method of reloading the browser pages. This makes faster reloading of the individual components and a much smoother user experience.

There are three main advantages of building your website’s frontend in React:

Website Performance

React uses modules called Document Object Model (DOM) to represent a web page in form of a tree. Html is written as a form of a node to this tree. With JavaScript, the style and attributes of each DOM can be updated without having to reload the whole page. This approach to selective update to a webpage area gives a notable boost to a website’s performance as compared to any other framework. Even when applied to a smaller website it shows a significant boost in performance but for large complex projects, the amount of time saved for a user to navigate the website becomes particularly large.

Speed to Market

This component-based approach to web app development allows developers to reuse code snippets not only across one app but across multiple apps as well. This speeds up the process of developing and launching new features as well as modifying or debugging the existing ones.

Developers

As mentioned earlier the technology is supported by not only Meta but also a vast community of other firms and developers. This means that the available libraries are constantly growing and getting updated. It is easier for developers to learn the technology, moreover due to the ease of maintaining React.js projects developers love it. Due to these reasons, there is already a large community of developers available in the market to hire.

If I already have a working website, do I need to rebuild my whole website?

The short answer is no, you will only need to rebuild the front end on React using the already existing backend. If you have a WordPress website you can create a website with a headless CMS using Rest APIs and React framework. Headless CMS is the latest CMS architecture that allows you to manage all the content in one place and deploy it across any frontend you need to. The advantage of a headless CMS is that, as React decreases the loading time by reducing the need to upload the whole webpage in the browser, headless CMS reduces the processing time in the backend. In addition, headless CMS will also give web developers much more flexibility in designing web pages and apps.