This cheat sheet provides a comprehensive guide to essential terms and definitions for enterprise e-commerce migration. While the terminology originates from the e-commerce sector, it's also applicable to related projects like product directories—where functionalities like "add to favorites" replace traditional basket and checkout systems—or any directory-based applications involving classifications, categories, hierarchical structures, searching, filtering, sorting, and pagination.
The rendering strategy terminology used in this guide comes specifically from Next.js, but these concepts can be adapted and applied to other frameworks as well.
💡 The purpose of publishing this cheat sheet is to streamline communication and ensure that everyone involved in the project is on the same page, making it easier to collaborate effectively.
The Enterprise Ecommerce Architecture Terms Cheat Sheet:
| Term | Full Name | Rendering Strategy | Caching Strategy | A/B testing or personalisation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 Listing 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. dynamic below the fold line | ISR variants above the fold and CSR below the fold or PPR |
Rendering and caching strategy definitions and links:
| ISR | Incremental Static Generation (on build and runtime phase) |
|---|---|
| CSR | Client Side Rendering (in the browser) |
| SSR | Server Side Rendering (on the server, on runtime phase, on each request) |
| SSG | Static Site Generation (on build phase) |
| PPR | Partial Prerendering a combination of static and dynamic. The best of both worlds. It's stil experimental feature of Next.js. |
| static | cached document on CDN like HTML output (use only bandwidth) |
| dynamic | document rendered dynamically on the request (use compute) |
| long tail | Less frequently accessed pages or content that are typically generated dynamically at the time of the request, often using SSR or ISR to optimize compute resources. |
| above the fold line | The visible part of a webpage without scrolling, critical for SEO and Core Web Vitals, as optimizing it enhances UX and load times. |
What’s the difference between PLP and CLP?
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.
