4 reasons to build your Shopify storefront with imorph

Direct to Client (D2C) e-commerce is flourishing!

And the biggest player out there who is helping the businesses to go online as D2C is, Shopify.

Shopify provides you with literally everything from managing catalog to orders to customers. And no wonder, a hosted SAAS platform always makes it easier to manage and host.

However, the storefront of shopify is using liquid, which is why it is forced to load every page from the server itself. This prevents the shopify stores to have a blazingly fast website and web browsing experience.

We at imorph have created a technical infrastructure to solve this problem and make your store blazing fast in just a few minutes. Here are some core reasons why you should build your shopify store's storefront with imorph.

1. Sub-second page load - Globally

A site built with imorph has a geographically distributed technical architecture with intelligent caching attached to it. Optimized widgets, minimal data flow, non-blocking communication together make the website blazing fast. And remember a fast website increases user communication and hence directly increases your revenue.

Distributed architecture with intelligent caching

By design imorph’s architecture is distributed across global data centers and CDNs. When a user hits a website (built with imorph) in his browser, the request gets served by the nearest CDN node or eventually server. This way the data transfer time is reduced and the first bit hits the browser fast.

Optimized widgets & non-blocking data flow

The widgets in the imorph builder, which eventually get rendered on the main website as well, are extremely efficient and choose the best way to get the required data. They know when to get the data from a different widget and when to make an API call. Additionally, the communication between widgets happens in a completely non-blocking way which makes the site rendering very fast.

Below is a snapshot of lighthouse score of a demo site.

2. Vue-js - the modern web

We have stepped into 2021 today and internet users are getting more familiar with the rich web browsing experience. It is not only just a sub-second loading website, a near real-time navigation experience is also a must-have feature.
A website built with imorph is by default created with vue.js, which is the most popular javascript framework to create a single-page-application. Vue’s virtual DOM and efficient change detection techniques do minimal DOM changes to reflect the changes even in the case of page navigation, which is much efficient than Shopify’s server-driven liquid template rendering.
Below is a video of page navigation in one of our demo sites

3. Native builder

Building web applications, especially single-page-applications are costly and takes a number of good developers. Then comes the cost of maintaining the site to push changes and also the server costs.
Being a cloud SAAS platform, imorph automatically takes care of the server hosting. But the breakthrough points are as follows:

SPA Builder

A product of its kind, imorph’s builder helps you to graphically create a complete vue js & nuxt application. Someone familiar with HTML-CSS can perfectly design the branding & styles (s)he needs. Even without HTML-CSS knowledge also you can graphically edit the majority of the components.

Intelligent SSR

Server-side rendering is a must for single-page-websites as without this getting a good ranking in search engines like Google is near to impossible. The intelligent mechanism of imorph knows which all widgets require server-side-rendering and what is the required data for that. If the relevant data is found in any parent or a sibling, the particular widget simply uses that, else makes an API call to fetch the data and eventually renders it in server-side HTML.

On top of bootstrap

While the majority of the website builders out there asks you to provide properties of each element; imorph’s builder gives you the flexibility to be into bootstrap’s ecosystem.
You can use bootstrap classes to style any element and hence the entire website. For any override, definitely, the feature of custom CSS is also there.

4. Cost

Many agencies build single page application and maintain them. One developer costs somewhere $5000 to $30000 per month (40 hours work week) depending on skillset. The time required to build and then maintaining the servers and hosting adds more cost.
However, on the other hand, imorph costs you like peanuts.