To Ajax or Not to Ajax a listing page
- by kaivalya
Here i am talking about product listing pages where there are multiple filters that filter the list of products appearing on the page like product types, categories price range etc.
I have done such pages using both ajax and no ajax way in the past.
What I like about using ajax in such page is that, when filters are selected I only update the section that contains the product list. There is no need to refresh the whole page which could end up re-loading the images on top bar, banners etc and slow down the user performance. Ajax way in my opinion becomes more compact and responsive from user experience.
Down side for ajax route for me is; since filter states are not maintained in the URL I end up maintaining them on the server. This becomes complicated if I want to handle multi window scenarios and it is also costly to maintain such state on server memory for each session.
Not using ajax and simply keeping all filter values on url and refreshing the page is quite simple but the luxury of refreshing only the pane that really needs to be refreshed is lost.
Lately I am seeing a lot of large scale e-commerce sites that are using non-ajax approach on their listing pages and this is making me question one more time if it might be more efficient to build non-ajax listing make due to the long term maintenance ease and sacrifice a little bit from user experience.
I am about to start implementing a new listing page for a product which I have the flexibility to go either way and I would appreciate your inputs.
