How to Build Product Discovery Experiences Lightning Fast with Klevu Web Components

Creating fast and efficient websites is essential in today’s digital world. Web development has come a long way, and the industry is now moving towards headless development solutions. Juha-Pekka Rajaniemi discusses headless development, web components, and their importance in creating quick and seamless websites.

Juha-Pekka Rajaniemi, Headless Frontend Lead at Klevu, has been working with us for one and a half years. Juha has helped us with our new SDK and other tools used to create collaborative frontends on Klevu’s product discovery software. In his talk, he discussed lighting-fast web components and their significance in web development.

Overall interest in headless development

Klevu, along with partners GoMage and Magento Association, conducted a survey of agencies and found that more than half (53%) said that they already are providing headless development with an additional 34% are planning to invest in headless development. This number was lower in Europe, however in Asia and the Pacific region, over 90% of the agencies are making headless websites. The question is: Is headless technology still gaining momentum? 77% of agencies say that they will adopt headless within the next few years. However, what is the holdup? What is taking so long to adapt these headless architectures? Juha suggests that between finding talented developers, not having the resources, as well as the availability of ready made themes all play a large factor.

What is the solution?

Components!

Thanks to the popularity of frameworks such as Angular, Vue, and React, component-driven development has become a part of our every day lives. Components help us encapsulate styles and behaviors into reusable building blocks. They make a lot of sense in terms of design, development, and testing.

Components have become ubiquitous in modern applications and designs, with component-based design systems and testing systems becoming increasingly popular. Even design tools like Figma are now component-based. As a result, it’s no surprise that every developer and organization has their own component library to draw from, making it easier to create high-quality, modular code that can be easily reused and scaled.

Not so fast…

While framework components are a popular and effective way to create modular code in web development, they also come with some challenges. Unfortunately, framework-specific components fail us in a number of ways:

• You can only use them in the framework they’re designed for
• Their lifespan is limited to that of the framework’s
• Migration pain between major changes to frameworks
• New frameworks/versions can lead to breaking changes, requiring substantial effort to update components
• Styling and customization may even change inside a framework

Web Components to the rescue!

Web components are the solution to all of these problems.

Web components are an industry-standard solution to the problems of component-based development. Unlike traditional components, web components do not require any frameworks or external libraries. Instead, they are built using HTML, and are an extension of the browser itself.

Despite being around since 2016, web components have only recently started gaining popularity in the web development industry. This may be due to the fact that it takes time for developers to embrace new technologies and integrate them into their workflows.

However, with the majority of modern browsers now supporting web components, it is clear that they offer a viable and standardized solution for creating components that can be used across different companies and projects. Web components have strict rules for styling, making it easier for developers to create consistent and reusable components.

Who is going to create these web components?

Web component development is a specialized skill that requires some learning- some may say that they are more complicated to create than a React or Vue. To tackle this challenge, some companies are creating their own web components.

Klevu has developed web components for search boxes, category navigation, and product recommendations. Once learned, these components can be used across different projects and can be easily styled with the standard CSS rules. Web components should be designed to connect with standard web components to create faster and more flexible designs.

How does the Klevu Web Components help?

Klevu has a list of ready made components that you can copy and paste the HTML to use any of the components however you would like. But we are not providing everything you need, but just the essential ones required to create discovery.

Different clients and different tech stacks? No problem. Klevu Web Components give you the ability to modify styles easily to fit into your clients individual designs.

Creating a Klevu account is your first step to success. With our Shopify, Magento, Big Commerce, Sales Force, or Commerce Tools connectors or the indexing API, you can make sure that all relevant data has been indexed and brought into our service. Get started on this journey here.

After this you can start using these components on your data.

Key takeways

Headless development solutions and web components are becoming increasingly important in web development. While over 50% of agencies are already providing headless development, there is an additional 34% plan to invest in it down the road.

Web components will make the process of going headless easier. They offer a solution to the limitations of traditional framework components, allowing for more efficient and standardized component development. With the majority of modern browsers supporting web components, they offer a viable solution for creating reusable components that can be used across different projects.

While web component development requires specialized skills, companies such as Klevu are creating their own components to increase efficiency and speed up the development process.