Architecture
A cheat sheet of e-commerce architecture regarding rendering strategies with caching strategies, A/B testing and personalization.
Introduction
The rendering strategy terminology referenced in this guide is derived specifically from the Next.js framework, summed up and posted on Vercel Community1 and are used in the Blazity's Enterprise Commerce project.
Rendering strategies
| Term | Full Name | Rendering Strategy | Caching Strategy | A/B Testing or Personalization |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HP | Home Page | ISR/SSG/PPR | Static | ISR variants above the fold and CSR below the fold or PPR |
| CLP | Category Landing Page (products + CMS content) | ISR/SSG/PPR | Static | ISR variants above the fold and CSR below the fold or PPR |
| PLP | Product Landing Page (products only) | ISR for main categories with pagination PPR/CSR/SSR/ISR for filtering/faceting/sorting | 1. Static for all SEO indexable URL 2. Dynamic for the faceting/filtering/sorting and long tail pagination | Ideally PPR/ISR variants for SEO indexable URLs. CSR/SSR for long tail |
| SRP | Search Results Page | SSR/ISR/CSR | Dynamic | PPR or CSR |
| PDP | Product Details Page | Pareto rule 80/20. SSG for the bestsellers. ISR for the long tail. | 1. Static for above the fold line 2. Dynamic below the fold line | ISR variants above the fold and CSR below the fold or PPR |
A Category Landing Page (CLP) is a key category page that users commonly land on while browsing an e-commerce site. These pages are shareable and indexable by Google, hence the term “Landing Page.”
CLPs are often manually curated, enriched with CMS content, and represent top-level categories or special landing pages.
They are usually linked in the Mega Navigation bar to facilitate better browsing.
CLPs are designed to load quickly with SEO-friendly URLs and can include a mix of manually curated content and automatically generated product listings.
In contrast, a Product Listing Page (PLP) is a purely automated page that lists products from the database without any additional CMS content. PLPs offer features like filtering, sorting, and pagination, and their URLs may include query strings for these options. PLPs may or may not be SEO indexable, depending on the setup.