Skip to main content

Best Practices

Frontend Performance Measuring, KPIs, and Monitoring

Frontend performance matters for user experience, conversion, ad placements, and good old SEO. To build fast websites, you must define performance metrics and KPIs and monitor, understand, and act on them.

Topic Maps 101

Everyone’s seen topic maps everywhere, from teachers’ blackboards to their favorite apps. They seem intuitive and self-evident, like they must’ve been around forever, but the truth is, they haven’t.

Unlike spreadsheets, which have been around for thousands of years (maybe that’s why everyone loves Excel so much!), topic maps have only been around since the 1990s. We’ll go into what they are, what they can do, and how you can make the most of the topic map implementation offered within Crystallize.

Benefits of Using GraphQL for Your eCommerce Business

To begin, it's essential to make sure we understand what GraphQL is. It's a technology developed by Facebook in 2012 to address their issues with mobile platforms. One of the technologies they were trying to use, REST, was not performing well in their particular setup, so they decided to replace it with a homegrown solution. GraphQL was the result. A few years later, the GraphQL specification was made open-source so that anyone could potentially benefit from it and contribute to it.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs (application programming interfaces) and a server for executing those queries. APIs are the means by which computer programs communicate with each other to exchange and manipulate data. 

REST is the most-used API architecture by far (as Postman's recent API report shows | graph is below); however, GraphQL adoption is on the rise, and many already are using it in place of REST to facilitate communication with all the different APIs that an application may have to talk to.

Choosing an eCommerce Platform Today Is Hard

The global eCommerce market reached a US $13 trillion value in 2021 and is forecasted to reach a whopping US $55.6 trillion by 2027.

With such growth of eCommerce year over year, it's essential for online retailers (and other businesses) to have the right technology to support their business and strategy. But with so many eCommerce platforms available, how can you tell which fits your business best?

How do you pick the one that suits your needs, keeps up with the development and market trends, and ensures your business's online success?

In part two of the five-part article series, we discuss choosing an eCommerce platform that's the right one for your use case.

Local SEO for eCommerce: How to Optimize Your Store for Local Search?

Local SEO focuses on optimizing a website's online presence to attract more local customers and improve search engine rankings for location-based queries.

SEO for Product Pages: The Basics

Great product pages are vital to a successful online store, so how do you optimize your product pages for SEO and high conversions?

eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Boosting Your Conversion Rate Made Simple In 2023

Are you struggling to convert your website traffic into paying customers? Are you tired of spending hours and resources on driving traffic to your site with little to no return on investment? Then it's time to focus on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

eCommerce SEO Checklist: The Best Practices For 2023

Not your average list but a comprehensive 19-point eCommerce SEO checklist with everything you need to know to optimize your store and successfully grow organic traffic and revenue.

Frontend Application End-to-End Testing

We all know that testing our website or web applications is important in helping us avoid breaking things down the line. It is what makes refactoring, adding new features, or simply fixing bugs so much easier. But are unit or integration tests enough?

What Is Product Taxonomy?

A great product taxonomy improves your customer user experience and how they find the right product they need much easier and faster.

Design System 101: How We Built Ours?

The design system acts as a repository for collections of reusable components and aims at closing the gap between designers and developers by providing easy access to pre-made design resources/components.

Content Modeling 101 for eCommerce

Content modeling is an interesting topic and lays the foundation for a great eCommerce architecture. When done correctly, of course.

Videos In Jamstack Websites and Apps

Video is dominating the digital marketing landscape and contrary to what you may have heard there are a couple of ways you can easily add them to your Jamstack website.

Web Safe Fonts

Every web page we visit on the internet has text to explain something, give us indications, or tell us a story. They can also be fundamental in design and branding. As we can see, typography is essential on the web, and it's also something we should consider when building a website or application for many reasons, like availability, readability, and performance.

But first, let's cover some basic fonts theory.

The eCommerce Performance Magic Sauce

Genuine internet craftsmanship is performed by experienced UX designers, front-end developers, and information architects. The combined focus on customer experience, frontend performance, and beautiful reusable information architecture is rocket fuel for SEO, conversion and click-through rates, and reusable content services.

The differentiation is in the execution—in the details.

Engaging Online Shopping Experiences with Video

Creating a seamless and engaging on-site customer experience is the ultimate goal for everyone running an online store. Besides your product/service, your store performance and product videos ensure you get the much-needed attention.

Using WebP in React

Fewer bytes to download for the user equals better pagespeed index, better conversion rate, and in general better user experience. It is also an important factor in eCommerce SEO.

The most well-known tricks to serve fewer bytes to download are:

  • Optimize the quality of the images
  • Use JPG where possible
  • Use srcset to serve different-sized images for the different devices

Now there's another way to reduce the size of the images: the relatively new image format WebP. It supports both lossless and lossy, and can be used both for images with and without transparency.

React srcset for Responsive Images

If you read about the srcset attribute on images previously but never got around to implementing it, keep reading. Your users with their limited phone data packages will love you!

React Image Sizes Attribute for Fast eCommerce

Images are crucial for frontend performance. Responsive images with srcset is a good start. If you have many and large images, consider lazy loading them. Soon, we get native HTML lazyload in our favorite browser also. When we wrote about srcset, we mentioned the sizes attribute, but not the importance of using this attribute so the browser loads the properly-sized image.

Let’s dig in.

How to Use Hyperlinks Properly?

Hyperlinks are one of the most important aspects of content creation, copywriting, and website management in general. And we should all know by now how to use hyperlinks properly, right?

Milliseconds Make Millions: Sell More and Grow Faster

Nowadays the performance of your website matters big time.

Semantic Web With Structured Data

By using structured data to describe your web pages, you contribute to a more semantic web. This is a web where we describe the data being shown and not just how it should look, making it machine-readable. Google also uses structured data to enhance search results. Here is how you can add, test, and verify that your web pages are properly structured for the semantic web - as Google sees it.

An important skill for better Internet craftsmanship.

Content Modeling Using Figma Design System

A great content model is the best starting point when starting a new webshop, App, or marketing website. The content model serves as documentation and overview and connects information architects, designers, developers, and business stakeholders. We have created a design system in Figma for content modeling.

Event Driven eCommerce Orchestration for a Jamstack Frontend

With site speed becoming an important part of a customer experience making sure that the number of backend requests during runtime has become important.

How to Use GraphQL to Populate Figma with Real Product Information?

Being able to use actual data is a great way to stress-test your design. Thanks to the use of API and a pre-made plugin you can now populate your Figma design file with product information from your Crystallize PIM.

Faster React TTI by Replacing Apollo with Urql

Having a fast API for your ecommerce is a vital backbone of the infrastructure. It ensures that the performance bottleneck is not the data provider, and leaves you to dedicate focus to other important arenas; such as frontend performance. Important topics to consider on frontend performance are page speed index and time to interactive. We replaced the Apollo GraphQL client library with Urql and saw significant performance improvements.

Better Developer Experience with GraphQL

GraphQL delivers a better developer experience with a self-describing API, query and mutation input validation, and a single query to your backend that returns exactly the data you need. This is why we based our fast ecommerce API on GraphQL.

SEO for React eCommerce SPA

React is super popular for eCommerce these days. Single-page applications (SPA) are typically the starting point due it their awesomeness. React SPA is however not awesome for SEO and time to first meaningful render. This is where server-side rendering (SSR) with Next.JS comes in. Frontend performance is super-important according to the ecommerce SEO checklist so you need to have fast APIs. GraphQL done properly could help your performance that you should verify with profiling and benchmarking. For eCommerce SEO the good old best practice still applies like title and h1 tag usage.