What is Frontend-as-a-Service?
The frontend of a website is the part that a user or visitor interacts with directly – what they see and experience as they navigate between pages, scroll, and click. “As-a-Service" technologies allow a subscriber to get value out of a packaged offering without having to purchase, assemble, and maintain the individual components to make it run.
Bringing these terms together, then, Frontend-as-a-Service (FEaaS) is a technology that allows a subscriber to build and deliver the part of their website that users interact with, without having to write the code or assemble and maintain the underlying infrastructure on their own.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- The Basics of Frontend-as-a-Service
- Who Should Consider Using a FEaaS
- The Benefits of Using a FEaaS
- How to Select and Get Started with the right FEaaS
The Basics of Frontend-as-a-Service
Traditionally, web development required developers to set up and manage a web server, configure a database, and handle the deployment process. This can be time-consuming and requires a significant amount of technical expertise. With Frontend-as-a-Service, teams can focus on the frontend visuals and experience, while the service provides the infrastructure.
Offered in a cloud environment, FEaaS delivers microservices-based, API-first frontend modules. By grouping a variety of development tools into one place in a modular framework, companies can deploy quicker upgrades, innovative content personalization, and an improved user experience to their frontend with ease.
With the frontend decoupled from the backend, there is more freedom to build unique experiences across channels and devices without facing the limitations of templates.
Who Should Consider a FEaaS
There are a few different reasons to deploy a Frontend-as-a-Service solution:
- Solving for a lack of development resources by empowering marketers and content creators
- Keeping up with promotions and inventory requires frequent website changes
- Staying on trend in a fast-moving industry and testing new content regularly requires quick iteration
- Suffering from website performance issues that disrupt SEO, customer experience, and growth
With the structure, performance, and navigational experience of a digital storefront being so critical, a Frontend-as-a-Service can offer substantial benefits to ecommerce businesses.
Benefits and Advantages of FEaaS
The power of delivering a seamless, personalized user experience on an ecommerce website is real. Research from Epsilon indicates that 80% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides a personalized experience while data from Material indicates 73% of consumers are willing to increase their purchases with a retailer by 10% if they are offered a superior customer experience.
Moving to a FEaaS solution provides a wide variety of advantages for companies:
1. Faster Time-to-Market
Because FEaaS solutions allow for greater design flexibility than pre-built templates, ecommerce businesses can get to market faster with a high-quality, interactive experience.
2. Improved User Experience
When using a frontend-as-a-service tool, companies can continuously improve their user experience and user interface by quickly implementing new features and problem-solving issues as they arise without impacting the backend functionality of their website.
3. Agility and Scalability
Because the best Frontend-as-a-Services are built with a modular structure, they can be scaled up and down easily, depending on the business needs. Composability, coupled with best-in-class integrations to backend tools like Salesforce afford a best-of-breed digital approach that prioritizes customers.
4. Risk Mitigation
Because Frontend-as-a-Service solutions don’t require you to repeatedly write or deploy new code from scratch, you lower the risk of introducing bugs or publishing new experiences with unintended consequences.
5. Affordability
Because FEaaS includes tools and templates that offer a simple-to-grasp concept, the technology can easily be learned by existing members of your team.
How to Select and Get Started with the right FEaaS
Using a comprehensive FEaaS technology saves ecommerce businesses time and money while improving conversion rates. This technology solution provides a tool for ecommerce businesses that allows them to quickly build and launch a frontend that is customer-centric, optimized, and cost-effective. But how do you choose the right one?
First, consider who on your team will be using the Frontend-as-a-Service. Some are designed for developers and require a significant amount of technical knowledge to use. Only one, Fastr Frontend, was built specifically for business users and designed to fully eliminate the need for developer support in building or publishing new frontend experiences.
Second, consider the backend systems and other third party applications you wish to use when automating your frontend experiences. It’s possible to orchestrate custom user journeys based on any kind of data, but not every FEaaS can connect to all backend systems or third party applications. Make sure you’re choosing a FEaaS that is platform agnostic so you have the freedom to change or add new tools at any time – like Fastr Frontend. In fact, we even build the connections for you so you don’t have to worry about additional integration timelines or developer constraints in getting up and running.
Third, think about how much time you have. Are you okay waiting months to a year to start seeing benefits from your technology solution, or would you prefer to bring experiences to life in a matter of days? Fastr Frontend lets you import existing designs or build them from scratch quickly with an intuitive editor, and you can orchestrate your data connections in minutes to have dynamic content experiences live on your site in just a few hours – no coding required.
Contact us to learn more about getting started with Fastr Frontend today.