Magento Headless PWAs: Everything You Need to Know

Progressive web apps (PWAs) have grown in popularity due to their superior speed and performance—as well as their ability to function like apps—without requiring your customers to download anything to their device.

PWAs, on the other hand, do much more than mimic the performance of native apps; they’re powerful tools for building ultra-fast loading, responsive e-commerce websites that work on desktop, mobile, and other devices.

If you use Magento (or Adobe Commerce, as it is now marketed) to provide eCommerce but want to outfit your online store with a more powerful frontend capable of enhanced customer experiences, redesigning your site as a PWA is the best way to do it.

We’ll go over the benefits of a headless Magento store, as well as answer all of your questions about what it takes to go headless with PWA technology.

What exactly is a Magento PWA?

Magento powers many successful online stores, and their more recent headless offering has enabled brands to do much more with their customer experience than previously possible.

PWAs provide additional flexibility, speed, and accessibility, allowing you to create fantastic shopping experiences regardless of channel.

A Magento PWA, in short, is any frontend presentation layer built with progressive web app technology and using Magento as a backend solution (managing payments, compliance, checkout, etc.).

Using PWAs to power your Magento storefront is possible due to Magento’s decision to separate their backend commerce layer from the frontend delivery layer, allowing you to use your preferred frontend (much more on this later.)

Now that Magento has enabled headless commerce on its platform, you can provide your customers with a much faster, cleaner, and a simply better experience.

In addition to the usual benefits of PWAs, Magento PWAs allow you to:

Make your site more visible in search	There are some excellent SEO plugins and extensions for Magento, but the standard, out-of-the-box Magento frontend has its flaws. However, when you rebuild your site with a PWA, you can configure your site indexing and other technical SEO components in a way that improves the discoverability of your Magento store in search.
Increase sales and conversions	Your store can better engage and convert customers with the improved customer experience and smooth navigation provided by PWAs.
Speed up your Magento site	PWAs can deliver much faster sites than traditional methods on monolithic Magento because they require less information before loading and displaying pages.
Future-proof your eCommerce set-up	By using a PWA for your frontend layer instead of Magento’s standard site template, you are removing — and replacing — the ‘head’ from your commerce platform. This enables you to use different programming languages and frameworks to design and operate your store’s front and backends separately. This front-end-agnostic approach gives you a lot more leeway when it comes to creating experiences for multiple channels. It also makes adding channels much easier as the need arises. By utilizing a PWA for this purpose, you are taking full advantage of Magento headless commerce and providing your brand with a competitive advantage for years to come.

However, there are numerous other ways to go headless with your Magento store as a PWA.

But, before we get there…

What exactly is Magento 2 headless?

Let us divide the question into two parts:

To begin, what exactly is headless Magento? Magento began as a monolithic commerce solution, with a common framework for creating and maintaining both the top layer site delivery that your customers see and the bottom layer—or the behind-the-scenes—eCommerce functionality that makes your online store tick.

Magento, on the other hand, has grown to meet the more advanced needs of online retailers selling in multichannel and omnichannel contexts as eCommerce has evolved.

To that end, they’ve separated the top layer (or head) from their backend functionality, allowing merchants to go headless with Magento.

So, what exactly is headless Magento 2? The name comes from the first Magento release that supported headless commerce. Essentially, Magento has supported APIs that facilitate communication between the Magento backend and a separate frontend since version 2.3, which means you can design and build your storefront in a framework that suits your needs rather than being limited by backend programming requirements.

How do I implement PWA technology in Magento 2?

As with most web design questions, the answer is ‘it depends.’ There are several paths to a PWA Magento site, as well as hybrid options.

However, there are four main ways to enable PWA technology in Magento 2 and make your Magento store headless:

Additions to your current website

This is the quickest and least expensive way to incorporate PWA technology into your Magento site. A large number of third-party developers have created Magento-compatible extensions, which can be easily added to your store. However, because you are not completely overhauling your site’s architecture, you are simply adding PWA features to the set-up you already have, they tend to have limited functionality.

This is a good option if you simply want to allow customers to add your mobile site to their home screen, improve page load times, or make your store more mobile-friendly. However, if you want to create a truly immersive and responsive customer experience, a Magento 2 PWA extension may fall short. If you go this route, double-check the features and functionality you’re getting, especially if you’re using a free extension.

A Magento PWA theme that has already been built

This method provides more functionality because you get a complete PWA solution to power your store, along with all of the superior performance that comes with it. However, the functionality is still limited to what your theme creator has built-in, and while it is possible to customize pre-built Magento themes, it is difficult and will require the assistance of developers to achieve the desired results.

If you want to create a bespoke customer experience, tailoring a Magento theme can be a lengthy process, and the longer the lead time, the higher the developer costs.

A frontend platform powered by PWA

If you want to go headless with your store as a PWA but don’t have the developer resources to create the ultra-high standard of customer experience that today’s shopper’s demand, this could be a great option.

In the same way that you use Magento’s backend functionality and wealth of experience to handle your store’s commerce functions, a frontend platform gives you access to a low-code environment where you can create breathtaking experiences, add rich visual merchandising, and get unrivaled site speed with the flexibility to update your storefront without requiring a large team of developers.

Making a PWA from the ground up in PWA Studio

This is the solution that will give you the most control over your store’s operations. You can design the exact solution you want if you build the entire site yourself. However, going this route will necessitate a team of developers with specialized knowledge of how to create PWAs and integrate them with Magento. ‍

It’s a time-consuming process with a long lead time. Not only do you have to invest time and money in developing your PWA site, but if you do it all yourself, you also take responsibility for maintenance and oversight: an ongoing responsibility that will result in significant overhead, especially if you need to make updates later.

What causes Magento to be headless?

Many stores continue to use Magento’s legacy monolithic platform. And it’s a perfectly usable solution for many day-to-day desktop site activities. However, with the growing importance of mobile and the proliferation of channels in eCommerce, the flaws are becoming more apparent.

It can be difficult for monolithic Magento-built stores to improve mobile site speed, connect to new channels, or demonstrate new rich merchandising features.

These issues stem from the backend and frontend being tethered together, which means that site changes frequently require re-coding, and HTML pages must jump through hoops on the backend before they can be displayed to your visitors.

However, Magento 2 stores can easily go headless thanks to the addition of GraphQL, REST, and SOAP as supported APIs (don’t worry if you’re using an older version of Magento—you can update.)

APIs are the critical links that enable backend and frontend separation, and they are essentially what makes Magento headless, or, to put it another way, allows for a simple conversion to headless mode.

The Advantages of a Headless Magento Store

Headless-enabled Magento 2 is a significant improvement over Magento 1, offering several advantages over its predecessor. The following are the changes that will have the greatest impact on online brands:

• Increased performance: Because the frontend is not supported on the backend, operations are much faster than with monolithic Magento.
• Optimized mobile shopping experience: Magento 1 did not always provide the best mobile experience for customers, with layouts sometimes not displaying properly on smaller device sizes. Magento 2 addresses these issues by providing a much more responsive mobile version.

• Connect multiple frontends: Because omnichannel retail is here to stay, maintaining consistency of customer experience across channels will remain critical. New touchpoints and ways of interacting with customers will emerge in the same way that BOPIS and in-store kiosks have progressed from fringe capabilities to standard offerings. Connecting new channels to your Magento store is a lot easier when you have a separate layer that handles your frontend presentation.
• Enhanced security: Magento 2 has made significant security improvements, such as the ability to use CAPTCHA and 2-factor authentication.

The Advantages of PWAs and Magento

Of course, you can go headless with Magento without using PWAs (PWA is just one way to go headless), but if you’re redesigning your frontend, a PWA is often the best fit.

A PWA output will provide you with:

• Even faster: Headless is faster than monolithic, and a PWA headless site is even faster due to how a PWA loads. This is a speed that is unique to a PWA output.
• Better UX/UI: When you redesign your site with a PWA, you can create app-like experiences directly from the browser. When you combine this with Magento 2’s improved mobile responsiveness, you will be able to provide your customers with an exceptional UX. As we saw in the examples above, this tends to correlate with an increase in your conversion rate!

• Improved SEO: With the introduction of mobile-first indexing and Google’s inclusion of speed as a ranking factor, SEO is no longer limited to keyword targeting. PWAs give you an advantage in the race to the top of the rankings because their speed and customer experience benefits make them more rewarding to search engines.

What is the price of a headless Magento?

Is Magento PWA available for free? It all depends, once again. Returning to the four methods of going headless with PWAs for your Magento store, the costs are as follows:

Method 1 – Extensions

These are typically the most affordable option, especially if you can install them yourself. However, you will still be required to pay for the extension. They start at $100, but these low-cost solutions will only perform a single function (adding product labels or enabling customer reviews, for example.) It can get expensive if you need to add a lot of functionality via extensions. Not only that, but you’ll have a substantial amount of extra code clogging up your site.

Method 2 – Themes

The prices of Magento 2 PWA themes range from free to very expensive. If you have a smaller store or don’t require extensive PWA functionality, a free theme may be appropriate for you. However, if you want to create a competitive user experience, you’ll need to invest in a theme that can match your ambitions. In addition, you will incur oversight costs and will be required to pay developers for any customization requirements.

Method 3 – A Frontend platform

This option may have the lowest total cost of ownership while still providing the most functionality. Because you’ll be working with a dedicated team of experts, your technical oversight costs will be lower, and you’ll be doing less ongoing technical management yourself.

Method 4 – A Bespoke PWA build

The most expensive option is as you will have to pay for hiring developers to build and maintain the site. You’ll also have to pay for ongoing contracts and vendor management. To build and maintain a completely custom store, you’ll need to assemble a slew of third-party tools and solutions, all of which come with ongoing costs.

A unified fronted platform: The best way to go headless with Magento

Using a frontend platform can provide you with all of the benefits of Magento PWA without the developer costs and technical oversight that come with customizing a pre-built theme or designing your own PWA storefront from scratch.
It allows you to change aspects of your store and push them to all of your channels without having to constantly code your changes.