What is SiteGenesis - Dive into Salesforce’s Legacy Commerce Architecture

If you’ve spent time anywhere near the world of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you’ve probably run into “SiteGenesis.” Maybe it’s the bones of your storefront, maybe it’s the thing your team curses after tough deployment weekends, or maybe it’s just the old world of ecommerce development and merchandising you’re being told to leave behind. So what is SiteGenesis, why did it get popular, and why is almost every forward-looking brand moving on.

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The Origin Story

SiteGenesis was first rolled out back in the Demandware era (think pre-2016, before Salesforce acquired them) as the primary reference architecture for building e-commerce storefronts on what’s now called Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud. The whole idea was simple enough: give brands a ready-made, production-grade starter kit for online stores—full of checkout, cart, product, and customer management baked in. Developers could clone, customize, and get to market faster than starting from scratch.

Back then, SiteGenesis was a breath of fresh air. It standardized how you built and extended an enterprise storefront and shipped with:

• Templates for every major shopping journey (home, category, product pages, cart, checkout)
  
  
• Core features like promotions, order management, customer accounts, and wish lists
  
  
• Extensible “cartridge” modules so you could plug in payments, shipping, or integrations with third-party tools
  
  
• “Pipelines” and later JavaScript controllers for customizing storefront logic
  
  

The Architecture: What’s Under the Hood?

SiteGenesis is a monolithic, server-rendered architecture. It’s split into two flavors: the older “Pipeline” version, and the newer JavaScript Controllers (SGJC) version. Either way, everything flows through the same core concepts:

• Controllers: Server-side scripts (JavaScript or proprietary pipeline scripts) that respond to customer actions—like adding to cart or searching.
  
  
• Cartridges: Modular code packages letting you drop in new features, integrations, or styling.
  
  
• Models and Views: Separates business logic from presentation, but with everything tightly coupled; no clean, modern APIs here.
  
  
• Templates and ISML: Custom template language creating the HTML shoppers actually see in their browser.
  
  
• Business Manager Hooks: Everything configurable from Salesforce’s Business Manager, with preferences for responsive design, visual effects, shipping, and more.
  
  

It’s “all in one box” development—quick for getting started, but not so great at keeping up with today’s front-end expectations.

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The Good, the Bad, and the Legacy

Why So Many Brands Used It

• Speed to Launch: Out-of-the-box templates meant you could get online fast, especially before mobile-first design was critical. You could tell a SG site from the home page though. A lot of retailers didn;t really change a lot.
  
  
• Rich Core Features: Promotions, loyalty, catalog tools, and deep integration specs from the jump.
  
  
• Customizable (to a Point): Cartridges gave some flexibility, and the community spawned tons of code snippets and quick wins.
  
  

What Dragged It Down

• Mobile Was an Afterthought: The first versions of SiteGenesis were barely responsive; the second generation didn’t bake in mobile best practices either.
  
  
• Monolithic, Not Modular: Updates were painful, and major changes risked breaking everything because of tightly coupled code.
  
  
• Performance Plateaus: Compared to modern frameworks, SiteGenesis sites often lag behind on loading speed and optimization, which hurts conversion and search rankings.
  
  
• Maintenance Over Innovation: Salesforce stopped releasing new features for SiteGenesis years ago. It’s stable, it still works, but it’s stale. You maintain and patch on SiteGen; you don’t innovate. It’s like a favorite Teddy Bear from your childhood.  There’s a lot of love gone into that thing even if its ears are held together with duct tape.

Why Are Teams Moving Off SiteGenesis?

By the time Salesforce launched Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) in 2018, it was clear that SiteGenesis was stuck in the past. SFRA brought a genuinely modular, mobile-first foundation to SFCC, and since then composable storefront options have pushed things even further. Salesforce has officially stopped active development on SiteGenesis—no new features, just essential security and bug fixes. If your site still runs on SiteGenesis, you’re running tech recognized as “legacy” by its own vendor.

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Should You Care About SiteGenesis Now?

Let’s put it plainly:

• If you’re still on SiteGenesis: It’s time to plan your replatform or upgrade. New business requirements - especially flexible, mobile, or API-first experiences - aren’t a good fit here anymore.
• If someone is telling you to start a new project on SiteGenesis, politely call Social Services. It’s a cry for help.
• If someone is telling you to upgrade to SFRA from SiteGenesis, ask yourself why. All innovation and support from Salesforce is now (finally) focused on headless, and composable storefronts. You could make this case for SFRA in 2023. But in 2025 are they trying to sell you SFRA today  and then composable in 2027, when maybe they know how to build with it. Don’t fall for it.
  
  

Final Takeaway

SiteGenesis is the foundation hundreds of major retailers built on. It did its job for years, but it’s now a museum piece in the world of digital commerce. If you’re serious about speed, innovation, or mobile, the smart move is to modernize. The future isn’t in the air tonight for SiteGenesis - it’s already completely Phil Collins’d its way out of the equation and is about to become a land of confusion (we could carry on…).

If you want honest advice on what to do next, or need help planning your exit from aging legacy tech, let’s talk.