The Feed’s need for speed inspired the journey into headless commerce. They wanted to build a lightning-fast experience for shoppers and efficiently update site-wide content to impact revenue—all while bypassing common monolithic site roadblocks, like:
Sluggish site performance
The Feed team wanted customers to explore and checkout without delays.
The existing site clocked a Google Lighthouse score of 79. However, there was room for improvement to get the score into the 90-100 range. Marketplaces prize performance ahead of aesthetics because frictionless shopping boosts conversions.
Ben Kennedy, CTO and Co-Founder, knew that products needed to be the primary focus for success:
“As a marketplace, it’s especially important that our visitors can navigate through dozens of product pages without delay. Initial page load is important but we knew the sub-second page-to-page load time was just as critical. We always want customers to browse the catalog as efficiently as possible.”
Template & content limitations
The Feed team also found it difficult to update their store templates to precisely match their vision. Testing and vetting new products with near constant site updates was proving hard to do at scale. The brand wanted to make site-wide changes easier.
“We wanted a setup that was more modular with components and sections so we could repurpose elements across the site.”
Development bottlenecks
Lastly, The Feed wanted to speed up time to market. With their existing site, new content always needed code and development resources to create. Ben and team wanted to empower more team members to create rich site content without so much code, freeing up developers for other projects.
As a lean team, The Feed didn’t want to allocate all of their dev resources to creating a completely custom headless site. So instead, they chose to go headless without a ton of vendors, or complex choices:
“We needed to strike a balance between having full code-level control, but also not having to implement and maintain a bunch of platform tooling we didn't need.”