Since October 2016, after a few months of research and “trial and error”, Michal Wujas and his team from our company Hatimeria, started to develop the new webshop for TheRake.com. With the rich API of Magento 2 as a base, a NodeJS server and ReactJS front-end, Hatimeria was able to build the first fully headless Magento 2 webshop.
Oppose to the traditional MageFront, TheRake.com is built with a ReactJS front-end, running on a NodeJS server. A technology which makes sure that the full website is rendered on the server side. Next to this, the webshop is fully build as a Single Page Application. SEO wise, full JS webshops are usually not the smartest thing to do. However, Michal Wujas and his team configured the ReactJS to be executed in the NodeJS server. Rendering the full code on the server side, and thus “readable and ready” for crawlers.
After the launch of TheRake.com, the business could see a 80% growth in organic traffic. Since going live in February 2017, TheRake.com has been listed by The Telegraph in the top 30 of best men’s fashion websites.
TheRake.com is an extension of a classic monthly magazine for men, the webshop is content-driven; where high quality products and content are presented as a complement to each other. Magento 2 by itself is not the best platform to create content, neither is Wordpress for sure not the best to build a webshop with. However, with the headless architecture, TheRake.com did not need to make any consensus. Hatimeria build the webshop in a way that both Magento 2 and Wordpress back-end are operating next to each other, making use of the key features of both platforms. Where before a implementation like this would cost a lot of time and money, with the headless architecture this was much faster accomplished.
Currently we reached an approx 30% coverage of all the Magento 2 functionalities with this technology. However, with a combination of other NodeJS ready software, like Algolia for search, the use of NPM as the package manager and world’s largest software registry for JS with over 500 000 packages, and having all the core processes covered: with only 30% coverage, an estimated of 80% of webshops could be build now with our headless structure.
The next steps is to create more coverage, to be able to serve an even broader range of Magento 2 webshops. At the end of the summer, Michal Wujas expects to have multi language / currencies, and the “my account” part ready. We are expecting to have build the fastest Magento 2 shop ever at the end of this year. In the meantime the next headless shop went live, and we are expanding. You can find see the full list here.
At the moment our goals is to spread the word about this webshop and it’s technology in the community. We will be writing articles and blogs about it. Our first blog about it, with a lot of details, you can find here (Dutch). We are looking for the right platform to share the English version of this blog.
If you have any questions, feedback, suggestions or just would like to discuss about the project in general, please get in contact with us! We would love to hear from you.
