Build for the future, with Composable Architecture

Composable architecture is not about chasing new technology. It’s about building websites that can evolve, without becoming fragile, expensive, or locked into yesterday’s decisions. In a market defined by rapid change - in platforms, customer behaviour, regulation and business models – classic websites built on monalithic platforms like Wordpress struggle to keep up. Composable architecture offers a more resilient alternative: one that prioritises flexibility, longevity and strategic control.

What does composable architecture actually mean?

By opting for a Composable Website stack, you are diversifying your website’s tech into independent, interchangeable parts. Rather than relying on a single monolithic system to handle everything, content, front-end presentation, commerce, data and integrations are decoupled and connected via APIs. Each part can be:

• Replaced without rebuilding the whole site
• Reused across multiple channels and interfaces
• Scaled independently as demands change

This modular structure allows organisations to evolve their digital presence incrementally, rather than through costly, high-risk rebuilds every few years.

Why do traditional websites struggle to scale?

Most websites aren’t designed for change, they’re designed for launch.

Conventional builds tend to:

• Bake content into templates, locking it into single use web pages
• Create vendor lock-in tying all your business logic into a single platform
• Accumulate technical debt as requirements grow

At first, the one-size-fits-all approach feels efficient – a single platform for everything may have marketable appeal. But over time, it becomes restrictive. New features take longer, content becomes harder to repurpose. And teams become dependent on specific tools or suppliers. Eventually, the website itself becomes a bottleneck to growth. Composable architecture addresses this by removing single points of failure and allowing systems to evolve and adapt to your business, not the other way around.

What is the difference between composable and headless?

Headless is a system capability within a composable strategy. A headlines CMS allows you to separate content from presentation, which is a useful step towards keeping it structured, portable, and reusable. But composable architecture goes further by extending this principle across the entire digital stack.

A composable system considers:

• How content is structured for reuse
• How front-ends (the visual client-facing part of a website) can be replaced or extended
• How new tools can be introduced without disruption
• How future requirements – not just current ones – are supported

In other words, composable architecture isn’t about one product choice. It’s about designing for change as a constant.

What are the business cases to adopt composable architecture?

Composable architecture doesn’t just reduce long-term risk. It prepares you for a changeable future. For growing organisations, a composable website system gives you:

• Faster adaptation to new channels, markets or customer needs
• Lower long-term costs by avoiding full rebuilds
• Greater resilience as platforms, vendors and technologies change
• Improved performance and scalability through focused, repurposable components

Most importantly, composable systems will allow your business to seize opportunities with confidence – knowing any new requirement can be integrated into your websites tech stack incrementally – while your competitors scramble to re-build.

Why are composable websites so important today?

The pace of change has outstripped the lifespan of traditional websites. The world is becoming increasingly unpredictable. Opportunities are there, but businesses need to be able to adapt and in some cases pivot to capitalise on them. Customer expectations shift more frequently and tools and platforms come and go. In this environment, locking everything into a single system like Wordpress, is increasingly risky. Composable architecture on the other hand, welcomes uncertainty. That’s why composable isn’t just a technical choice; It’s a strategic one.

Our approach at Function & Form

We use composable architecture to protect long-term viability for our clients, rather than chasing trends, by prioritising:

• Structured, portable content that can be re-purposed later
• Technology choices that can evolve over time
• Architecture that supports growth, not just launch
• Beautiful interactive experiences personalised to your audience

Our role is not simply to assemble tools, but to engineer systems that remain valuable as the business changes; whether that means scaling quickly, pivoting direction, or integrating new capabilities down the line.

When does Composable Website Architecture make sense?

Composable architecture is particularly effective when:

• You expect your website to evolve significantly over time
• Content may need to be reused across platforms or regions
• Performance, scalability or resilience are critical
• You want to reduce dependency on a single vendor or system
• Your website is a strategic business asset, not a marketing afterthought

In these cases, composable website architecture is a proactive step in securing your business’s future.

That all sounds great, but how does composable architecture actually work?

The real hero of Composable architecture are APIs. Application Programming Interfaces act as universal languages, allowing independent systems to communicate with one another cleanly and reliably. Rather than hard-wiring content, functionality and presentation together, APIs enable data to be requested and exchanged in real time, only when and where it’s needed.

This approach has become increasingly practical with the rise of JavaScript-driven front-ends and Progressive Web Apps, built using frameworks such as Vue and React. These front-ends are designed to query multiple services dynamically, making composable systems both performant and flexible by default.

The MACH principle behind composable architecture

Composable architecture is often described using the MACH framework, which outlines the core technical principles that make this approach possible:

1. Microservices Individual units of business functionality — such as search, commerce, authentication or personalisation — that are developed, deployed and maintained independently.
2. APIs The connective tissue of the system. APIs expose data and functionality between services, allowing each component to evolve without disrupting the others.
3. Cloud-native services Specialist SaaS platforms that handle infrastructure, scaling and reliability off-site — reducing operational burden on internal teams while increasing resilience.
4. Headless front-ends Presentation layers that are fully decoupled from back-end systems. This makes the website or app framework-agnostic, easier to replace, and free to evolve as user needs change.

Why this matters in practice

Together, these principles remove tight coupling from your digital stack. Instead of a single system doing everything and becoming fragile as it grows, each part of the architecture is free to change, scale or be replaced independently.

The result isn’t technical complexity for its own sake, but long-term flexibility: the ability to respond to new requirements without rebuilding everything from scratch.

Being prepared for what’s next

The future is unpredictable. Website architecture shouldn’t make that worse.

Composable architecture offers a way to build digital systems that remain adaptable – even as technologies, markets and expectations shift.

It’s not about building everything upfront. It’s about building the right foundations so change is possible when it matters.

Composable architecture in practice: Advatek™

Advatek is the world’s leading manufacturer of professional LED control hardware, serving global B2B clients alongside a growing B2C audience.

By 2022, their existing Magento-based ecommerce platform had become a constraint rather than an enabler. It lacked flexibility, made marketing-led content difficult to manage, and tied Advatek to a single agency and system — slowing progress at a critical growth stage.

The core problem was architectural

Too much responsibility sat inside one platform, forcing fundamentally different needs — B2B, B2C, content, commerce and operations — to compete within the same system.

We replaced this monolithic setup with a composable one, allowing each part of the business to scale independently:

• Nuxt™ for a high-performance, custom front-end
• Sanity™ for structured, reusable content
• BigCommerce™ to handle secure transactions and pricing
• NetSuite™ for inventory and order fulfilment
• HubSpot™ to manage B2B customers, enquiries and quotes

The result was a faster, more resilient platform that exceeded the performance of the previous site within months — and removed long-term dependency on a single vendor or agency.