Deploying an Angular Store on Magento

Deliver a sub-second Angular website on Magento with Layer0

Angular is a frontend framework created by Google. It is a popular solution for large enterprise websites that plan to scale their site quickly. All in all, Angular offers great runtime performance and is fit to be the backbone for complex, revenue-generating websites with heavy traffic, such as eCommerce and Travel websites.

Angular comes with a bunch of built-in capabilities, including:

• Code generation: Angular generates code that's highly optimized for JavaScript virtual machines, providing the benefits of hand-written code. HTML templates combined with JavaScript open the door for optimizations that are simply not possible in other frameworks, for example React.
• Code splitting: Angular apps load quickly, delivering automatic code-splitting. This way, users load code required to render the view they request.
• Real DOM: Angular uses real DOM, making the framework best suited for websites that do not change frequently. However, the framework is not the best choice for large websites, or those that make frequent updates, such as most eCommerce sites.

Magento 2 is a popular eCommerce platform based on PHP7 and supports HTML5. In addition to its own proprietary frontend frameworks, the platform also supports multiple frameworks, including the Zend Framework 1 and 2 and MySQL Percona 5.6 or greater. The platform offers rich, out-of-the-box features, third-party integrations, and customizations.

Key features which help performance include:

• NGINX: A web server that serves as a reverse proxy, HTTP cache, and load balancer.
• Varnish: An HTTP accelerator built for content-heavy dynamic web pages, such as eCommerce websites on Magento 2.
• Composer: A tool for dependency management in PHP which can allow you to reuse third-party libraries without bundling with source code and reduce extension conflicts.
• Symfony: A PHP web application framework for controlling the content, functionality, and look and feel of your online store.
• Redis: An open source, in-memory data structure store used as a database, cache and message broker.

While there are some promising features, including a built in caching module, the platform does little to help vendors in terms of site speed. In fact, the platform leaves most site speed optimization to its customers and their developers / implementors.

In terms of frontend compatibility, Magento 2 offers a few proprietary frontends and robust APIs. Its frontends include: Base, Luma, and PWA Studio (available for M2.3 and up) and APIs include: REST, SOAP, and GraphQL. Please note that PWA Studio and GraphQL are both only supported on Magento 2.3 or later. Furthermore, PWA Studio is geared specifically toward the platform, so you remain locked into its ecosystem. You can connect your own portable frontend or headless endpoints to the platform via the GraphQL API, however, customization of  Magento's code and/or database schema can disrupt API compatibility.  

Layer0 lets you deliver your Angular store on Magento for sub-second speeds. While Magento 1 is no longer supported by the platform, it is still compatible with Layer0. The average website on Layer0 see median speeds of 320ms loads, as measured by Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). However, Layer0 is much more than a website accelerator. It is a Jamstack platform for eCommerce. Layer0 makes websites faster for users and simpler for frontend developers to maintain. The platform was built specifically for large-scale, database-driven websites, such as eCommerce and Travel, to bring the following benefits: 

• Jamstack for eCommerce via both pre and just-in-time rendering
• Zero latency networking via prefetching of data from your product catalog APIs
• An edge that can be configured natively in your Angular app (CDN-as-JavaScript)
• Edge rules that can run locally, in pre-production and production environments  
• Automated, full-stack preview URLs from GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket with every new branch and push
• Performant split tests at the edge and A/B tests that do not slow down the site, canary deploys, and personalization
• Serverless JavaScript that is much easier and more reliable than AWS Lambda
  

With Layer0, your Angular Magento store will run in sub-second speeds and your developers will be empowered to control edge caching and reduce rework using the various developer productivity tools that come with the platform.

Browse around AKIRA, a Magento website on Layer0. AKIRA went from 6 seconds to sub-second page loads and saw mobile transactions double on Layer0.

If you're currently using Angular, use the this guide to deploy your Angular app on Layer0 and get sub-second loads in as soon as 1 hour of work.