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The Magento storefront is the place that includes all components for your customers to complete the purchase path(the path customers take to a sale). It’s one of the most crucial factors in your eCommerce store to convert visitors into customers.
And did you know that nowadays, people usually only spend a few seconds on a page before they decide to stay or go somewhere else? It’s not long to make an impression.
Thus, your storefront is where you make it or break it.
So in this article, we will show you a comprehensive guide on how to choose and customize your Magento storefront to attract customers.
Let’s go!
What Is The Storefront?
The storefront of a Magento website is the external, public-facing part of your store. It provides the content and functional components that your customers use to shop and purchase.
The Magento storefront includes six basic pages, as follows:
1. Home page
2. Catalog page
3. Search results
There are two types of searches on Magento:
Live search
Standard catalog search
4. Product page
5. Shopping cart
6. Checkout page
The checkout process consists of two steps:
Shipping Information
Review and Payment Information
How To Choose The Right Magento 2 Storefront
Clearly, the Magento storefront is where you make the first impression with your visitors. But the storefront is not just about the appearance. It’s also about technology.
As you know, the eCommerce business is extremely competitive. To stay ahead of the competition, you must keep up with the latest technology, or else you can’t fully satisfy your customers.
For example, in recent years, mobile eCommerce has been growing rapidly. Thus, enhancing the mobile shopping experience is a crucial factor.
>> EXPLORE NOW: Turn your eCommerce website into a fully native Android & iOS app without coding knowledge with Magento 2 Mobile App!
Another thing is about website loading speed. A study finds 1-second delay in website load time means a 7% reduction in conversions. So optimizing the page speed is also essential.
So when choosing your Magento 2 storefront, don’t just choose based on the look, but you should also consider its tech specs.
3 Best Storefront Solutions For Magento In 2023
Luma-based themes
Luma was released in 2016 as the default Magento 2 theme, which is the starting theme for Magento/Adobe Commerce stores.
Luma has a powerful infrastructure and integrates Responsive Web Design (RWB) practices into builds. Based on the Magento UI library, with its customizable components and interface, Luma uses CSS3 media queries for its device adaptability and responsiveness.
Based on Luma theme technology, there are countless beautiful themes for any style you want. And many of them are free. You can find those themes on Magento theme markets like ThemeForest, TemplateMonster, etc.
Pros:
- Compatible with all third-party extensions: Since it’s the default Magento theme, all third-party extensions are built to be compatible with it, which can ease the development time and reduce the cost of a new build.
Cons:
- Poor performance: Due to its code structure that requires additional JavaScript and CSS, it can cause poor performance and SEO.
Headless commerce
Headless Commerce was introduced in 2013 as a great solution for Magento’s default technology drawbacks.
A headless eCommerce website is a website where the front end and the back end application are developed separately and often based on different technologies.
For example, it could be a PWA frontend that connects to Magento by using GraphQL as glue.
Pros:
- Enrich customer experience: Headless commerce allows a consistent customer shopping experience across various platforms and devices, and it enables a more personalized experience for customers.
- Better Omnichannel marketing: A headless system allows content sharing across a wide range of platforms.
- Better flexibility: With the headless solution, you can quickly update the front end without disturbing the back end.
- Faster scaling: It’s easier for website developers to make updates because the front end and back end are separate.
Cons:
- Potential additional costs: The separation of the front end and back end means each one needs its hosting and maintenance, which adds additional costs to operate the website. Another cost is to train team members or hire specialists to maintain the website for upgrades, security, bugs, design templates, etc.
- Slow marketing adjustments: The marketing team needs to rely heavily on the IT team to launch and update content, which can cause delays in time-sensitive campaigns.
Note that using a pre-made PWA theme can eliminate most of the disadvantages of the PWA storefront.
>> CHECK NOW: Turn your store into a headless storefront with Siminia Theme!
Hyva theme
Hyva was released in 2021, and it is considered an alternative to headless PWAs.
The Hyva theme was created to keep everything great about Magento but eliminate elements that cause complications and inefficiencies. As a result, the Hyva theme is lightweight but still flexible for functionalities to run.
Pros:
- Amazing performance: Websites built on Hyva will have fast loading time on desktops and mobile devices.
- Reduced complexity: The Hyva theme has many features but with less complexity.
- Reduced dependencies: Because the Hyva theme contains only two dependencies, it is more reliable than most alternative solutions.
- Less development time: Due to the simple code, it is easier for developers to work on debugging issues and new features.
- Easy to use: The simplicity also reduces the slope of your learning curve using the Hyva theme.
Cons:
- Lack of 3rd-party modules: Because the Hyva theme is new and different from other Magento frontends, you must find and install Hyva-compatible modules. However, many Magento extension providers are working actively to support Hyva.
- High cost of license: The license cost of Hyva is a one-time payment of €1,000, which could be quite expensive.
Best Solution To Implement Magento PWA Storefront
Based on PWA Studio, Siminia Theme by SimiCart is an easy way to transform your store into a headless storefront that is fast, engaging, and mobile-friendly.
Siminia theme can guarantee a lightning-fast and beautiful storefront for your Magento 2 website.
It works with most current Magento 2 extensions in the market, making it easy to install and use third-party modules to extend your store functionality.
And the Siminia Theme aims to be stable and easy to maintain, so you don’t need to worry about future Magento version upgrades.
Additionally, Siminia Theme allows you to easily customize your PWA page just by dragging and dropping with their integrated page builder tool. And you are provided with 90+ beautiful templates you don’t need to build your pages from scratch.
Most importantly, Siminia is built to be 100% SEO-friendly. It integrates all that is needed to optimize your SEO performance.
Check out 3 main USPs of Siminia Theme below.
Conclusion
In this article, we have shown you a complete guide on choosing and customizing your Magento storefront to optimize the customer experience on your eCommerce website.
We hope this is helpful, and good luck to you!
