If you’ve spent the last few years feeling like your digital experience isn’t quite keeping pace with your ambitions, you’re not alone. Since 2020, most businesses have been in reactive mode. There hasn’t been much breathing room to step back and properly assess whether your tech stack is still fit for purpose.
The result? A lot of companies now find themselves with frontends that feel sluggish, backends that feel even slower, and a growing sense that competitors are pulling ahead. According to Gartner, 90% of current applications are considered outdated due to insufficient modernisation efforts. Qualtrics estimates that bad customer experiences put nearly $4 trillion in global sales at risk annually. Those numbers should get anyone’s attention.
But here’s the thing: fixing this doesn’t necessarily mean tearing everything down and starting over. There’s a middle path that’s worth understanding.
What is an experience layer?
Like any concept that’s gained traction across the industry, this one goes by many names. You might hear it called a headless frontend, composable frontend, API-driven frontend, or presentation layer. Some call it a DX layer, CX layer, or experience orchestration layer while others frame it as digital experience transformation.
They’re all describing essentially the same architectural approach: decoupling the customer-facing experience from backend systems to gain speed, flexibility, and creative control. For simplicity, we’ll stick with “experience layer” here. The experience layer is the topmost layer in a digital commerce or digital experience technology stack. It’s the interface your customers actually interact with, the part that orchestrates and delivers their experience across your website, mobile app, and any other digital touchpoint.
In traditional setups, the frontend and backend are tightly coupled. When you want to change something on the surface, you often end up touching systems deep underneath. Updates get expensive. Development cycles drag on. Things break in unexpected ways.
An experience layer architecture works differently. It decouples the frontend from the backend, connecting them through APIs. Your commerce engine, your CMS, your CRM, your analytics tools, they all sit behind a gateway layer. The experience layer pulls what it needs from each system and shapes it for whatever channel or context makes sense.
This separation is the key point. Your backend systems can keep doing what they do well. Your frontend gains the freedom to evolve independently, faster, and with far less risk.
Is this right for every business?
Not necessarily. This approach makes the most sense for organisations that already have a foundational digital infrastructure in place but are seeking to enhance their customer interactions through more personalized and seamless experiences. Companies operating across multiple markets or channels, where consistency matters but localisation is also important. Businesses where customer experience is a genuine differentiator, not just a nice-to-have.
If your backend itself needs replacing, that’s a different conversation. But if the engine works and the problem is how customers experience it, an experience layer is worth serious consideration.
A note on technology choices
There are multiple ways to implement an experience layer. Frontend-as-a-service platforms, edge delivery solutions, high-performance hosting and deployment tools. The right choice depends on your existing stack, your team’s capabilities, and your specific requirements.
We’re solution-agnostic and have deep expertise across several of the leading frameworks and solutions such as React and Vue.js, Alokai, Vercel and Adobe Edge Delivery Services. The goal however isn’t to push a particular technology. It’s to find the architecture that actually solves your problem.
Where to go from here
If any of this resonates, it might be worth a conversation about where you are, what’s holding you back, and whether an experience layer approach makes sense for your situation.
We’ve been designing and building experience layers for over a decade, across retail, luxury, automotive, and other sectors where digital experience directly impacts the bottom line.
Sometimes the answer is a full frontend transformation. Sometimes it’s a smaller intervention. Sometimes it’s not the right move at all. But it’s worth understanding the options.
