Is React Best For Micro Frontend? Is It a Smart Choice For Businesses?

Is the thought of users leaving your website or app due to slow loading times or an unattractive user interface a source of concern for your business? According to a 2022 Statista survey, ReactJS micro frontends are favored by 42.62% of developers because of the substantial benefits they offer to developers, business owners, and end users.

What is Micro Frontend?

Developers and businesses have moved away from the traditional monolithic architecture, which has been widely used for decades. The new standard is micro frontend development, which streamlines the development process and delivers an attractive user interface to the target audience.

Leveraging ReactJS for micro frontend development enables the fragmentation of large, unwieldy frontend monoliths into smaller, more manageable components.

With React micro frontend, multiple teams can create components using different technologies, streamlining the development process, making it faster, and offering greater diversity. This facilitates businesses in maintaining their operations without interruptions

Why are Businesses Opting for ReactJS Micro Frontend?

Many businesses, spanning a wide range of sizes, are increasingly adopting React micro frontends due to its significant technological advancements, which deliver an exceptional user interface experience to their target audience.

Businesses of various scales, from medium-sized enterprises to large corporations, operate complex websites and applications with multiple layers, features, services, and tools. Given the high volume of online traffic they handle, it becomes imperative for organizations to ensure their applications and websites are highly responsive, maintain data security, and offer robust performance.

To enhance the user experience, businesses continually update their websites and apps. These updates may involve adding or removing specific tools and interfaces.

ReactJS micro frontends simplify the process of customizing the app without disrupting other interfaces within the application. We've collaborated with numerous businesses, empowering them to create visually appealing user interfaces using React micro frontends without any interference with concurrent interfaces and the online operations of our clients.

Here are some key reasons why businesses are increasingly favoring ReactJS micro frontends for app development

Flexibility

Businesses and app-related technologies are subject to continuous evolution, often requiring unforeseen updates. To keep up with shifting market trends and changing user behavior, enterprises must implement technological changes.

Employing a React micro frontend approach facilitates swift and seamless customization, all while preserving overall performance and user interfaces. This is achieved by breaking down interface components into smaller, more manageable parts, simplifying the integration of new technologies with a reduced codebase.

Autonomous Development

The traditional monolithic architecture of the frontend often imposes limitations on both businesses and developers in terms of individual ownership. This is because making customizations or engineering changes to a monolithic frontend can have far-reaching impacts on the entire codebase.

Conversely, micro frontend architecture provides a way for businesses to break free from the complexities of multi-layer approvals and laborious development processes. These microservices for the frontend grant full ownership, allowing for changes and updates to be made without disrupting the regular operations of the online business.

Scalability

As multiple teams with developers can work in parallel with react micro frontends it becomes easy for businesses to add new features, and interfaces in no time.

With small codebases, it becomes easy to integrate the new capabilities hassle-free and without impacting the performance of other features and interfaces of the frontend.

Also, it is possible to combine different frameworks or libraries in a single project giving liberty to the businesses to stack multiple technologies and get a desirable result and user experience

Quick Testing

In the monolithic frontend, testing could be an arduous job as testing takes place across the entire application. Testing is an unavoidable process- as it helps in controlling the problems that could be encountered during business operations.

In monolithic architecture, though changes are simple and frivolous the entire codebase needs to be testified which consumes a considerable amount of time. Such an extensive testing process may delay the deployment and launch of the app which result in missing the market opportunity.

To avoid such situations, micro frontend react simplifies the testing process by self-containing the single micro-app. Even if a bug or issue erupts during testing it stays limited to the micro frontend component- not affecting other components of the frontend.

Independent Deployment

React’s micro frontend architecture allows the deployment of different components individually. It doesn’t matter where the code resides or is hosted, each micro frontend component possesses a development pipeline that includes building, testing, and deployment.

As you can deploy the react micro frontends individually it also allows you to ship features in lesser time. Unlike a monolithic frontend, micro-services don’t obstruct you from deploying a ready part.

Cost Benefit Analysis Of React Micro Frontends

A cost-benefit analysis is indeed necessary to identify and quantify the benefits related to the micro frontends. We are listing some cost drivers that monolithic architecture imposes on businesses. It may vary depending on the nature of the business and other factors but top cost drivers are listed below.

Complex Frontend

Complex and large frontend invites increased maintenance costs. Businesses may have to incur extra expenses due to the inflexibility and scaling difficulties of the traditional monolithic frontend. The complex monolithic frontend can also obstruct the revenue-generating activities of the app which in turn may require extra costs for the solutions.

Inflexible and Large Codes

Dependence on one single codebase in monolithic architecture distresses businesses as well as developers. This dependency on a single codebase requires extra development, testing, integration, and deployment time.

ReactJS micro frontend depends on multiple components with a small codebase making it more agile and efficient. Such micro frontends with smaller codes are easy to scale, require no-to-less maintenance, and reduce barriers to business operations.

Development Speed

Undoubtedly, the monolithic frontend requires more development time, intensive updates, resources, and integration- all these factors affect the development speed, making it more time-consuming.

While in react micro frontend codes are smaller as well as simple. The micro-services are independent of each other with multiple developers and teams working individually on each component. This helps in accelerating the speed of project delivery.

The cost of updating frontend monoliths is unpredictable and it can be banished with this streamlined and modular approach of react micro frontend architecture.

Conclusion

Micro-frontend react is ideal not just for enterprises but it is equally beneficial for SMEs and startups. Micro frontend architecture developed with react simplifies the development, integration, testing, and deployment process by dividing entire complex projects into smaller components. It allows multiple teams and developers to work individually with multiple technology stacks, frameworks, and libraries.