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On average, homeowners stay in a house for 12 years. When they sell the house and someone else moves in, the new occupant may find that that decor is dated, that the kitchen needs new appliances, or that the carpet needs replacing. These renovations aren’t cheap, but they're relatively affordable compared to building a brand-new house. Additions can be added, decks built, and wood floors refinished, all without tearing down the original house and starting from scratch. People come and go, tastes change and so do the needs of the owners, but the basic structure can last a hundred years or more. 

When it comes to websites, businesses have traditionally taken a different approach. A website is developed at great expense, the business celebrates its release, and it’s touted as a big step forward for the company. Fast forward three to five years and the once-current website is starting to feel dated, and the business needs have changed. Additionally, the average time an executive stays in their role is 4.9 years, so the odds are good that there’s new leadership at the organization as well, leadership who is eager to leave their mark. The old website gets scrapped and a new one gets built, again, at great expense and is touted as the next big step forward for the company, and the cycle starts anew. 

In this post, we’ll look at how embracing composable technology can help your organization break this cycle and start treating your website like a well cared for home, saving time and money in the process.

The Alternative to Disposable is Composable

In the past, it was necessary to periodically replace entire websites because they were built using page-centric design and monolithic architectures. All the components of the website—frontend, backend, and database—were tightly integrated and managed as a single, unified system. Because of this unified nature, sites built using monolithic architectures are difficult to scale and don’t lend themselves to being easily updated. After a while, when the technology and design debt become too large to ignore, or when the organization's needs have changed substantially, it’s necessary to write off the old site and build a new one from scratch.

Composable, headless architecture, on the other hand, offers a different approach. Rather than everything being unified as it is with a monolithic architecture, the site is built using individual SaaS components for each service. This allows you to be flexible in where you source these components. You can adopt multiple components from the same platform. That could look like one platform for content editing, another for search, a third for auth and security, and so on. It all depends on the unique needs of your organization. 

Each service is handled by the tool that fits your organization’s needs, and because you’re leveraging SaaS platforms, development time is reduced, and the product receives regular updates and refinements. This approach has many advantages, which we’ve covered extensively in our journal. One of the biggest is that it can help your organization avoid completely redesigning its website every three to five years.

Layering in What You Need When You Need It

If you’ve ever taken a break from social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn and then hopped back on months or years later, you’ll notice how much things have changed. But log in daily, and you’ll rarely notice. That’s because these organizations take an iterative approach to development and are constantly being updated in small ways rather than undergoing massive redesigns every few years.

It’s not just big tech companies that are taking this approach; many enterprise-scale organizations have moved away from releasing new websites regularly and instead continuously update their sites based on business needs and changing trends. 

With composable tech, your organization can do something similar. By going headless with your site, you can separate each component needed, and update or change those on an ongoing, iterative basis. Does your business need to add e-commerce functionality? Does your member organization want to give members better access to content with AI-powered search? Does your company need a more user-friendly way of authenticating users? Are you ready to explore AI-driven personalization? How about visual editing? We could go on and on here. In the past, any of these would have required extensive reworking of your site. With composable architecture, you can layer on these services to your existing site without having to completely re-platform and redesign everything.

Composable Adoption Doesn’t Require an Initial Overhaul

At this point, you might be thinking “This all sounds great, but wouldn’t we still need to do a full redesign of our site to get started with composable?” That’s a logical assumption to make, but fortunately, it’s often not the case. That’s because going headless and composable is not an all-or-nothing proposition. A number of our clients have been making the move from monolithic to composable over the years, slowly layering in composable components as needed. 

Take our work with ICSC–a member organization for retail real estate. Our relationship with ICSC started over a decade ago when we were hired to implement ExpressionEngine as a CMS. At the time, monolithic websites were the norm, and the site we built for ICSC was thoroughly modern. 

But, as the years went by, we helped ICSC to adopt individual composable components as the need arose. When they wanted to improve search functionality and allow for better member-matching features, we helped layer search-as-a-service provider Algolia on their site. When they wanted to boost security and make it easier for members to access the site, we implemented Stytch for SaaS authorization and authentication. To improve how they sell access to events and memberships on the site, we implemented Stripe, a SaaS credit card processing platform. When commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms didn’t meet organizational needs, we created independent API-first services rather than building everything right into the existing CMS platform.

In the 13 years we’ve worked with ICSC, their website has never undergone a complete overhaul. That’s because it hasn’t been necessary; we’ve been able to quietly add composable elements as needed to meet ICSC’s needs and to keep the site up-to-date.

Breaking the Reset to ‘Crawl’ Cycle

There’s a truism in business about needing to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. When you scrap your website every couple of years and start from scratch, it’s enormously disruptive. In terms of your digital footprint, you’re resetting to ‘crawl’ every time you do this.

Adopting composable, headless architecture–and taking an iterative approach to design, which we covered in a previous post–is a great way to break this trend. Not only that, it can smooth out the development cycle so that your website budget can be consistent from year to year, rather than having to find the funds for complete website redo every couple of years. 

If you’re interested in having greater flexibility, a more manageable website budget, and access to best-in-class SaaS solutions for your organization, then going composable might be the choice for you. 

Interested in breaking free of the endless website redesign cycle? Let’s talk!