Independent deployment, not code splitting, is what actually lets teams move fast. How to structure frontend work so your checkout team doesn't wait on search.
Microfrontends are usually sold as an organizational story: your checkout team owns checkout, your search team owns search, your account team owns account. Each team moves at its own speed. Each ships independently. The host application stitches the pieces together into one product.
This story maps cleanly to how large products are actually built. The problem is that most teams claiming to use microfrontends aren't actually independent, they're still sharing a build and deployment process.
When you compose frontends at build time, bundling the checkout, search, and account code together into a single application, you force every team to coordinate. The host application must rebuild whenever any team changes their code. A bug in search delays the checkout team's deploy. The account team's new feature sits in a branch waiting for the build pipeline to clear.
This isn't microfrontends. It's split code sharing a deployment boundary.
Real microfrontends let each team deploy to production independently. The checkout team ships checkout without waiting. The search team ships search without waiting. Each team owns their own deployment boundary. The host application doesn't rebuild, it loads each piece at runtime and stitches them together.
This is the only way to achieve the speed and autonomy that microfrontends promise.
Build-time composition isn't the only way to structure frontend work. Projection-based architecture avoids the coordination tax altogether. Each team's code runs independently, and pieces connect at runtime instead of during a build step.
This means no shared build process, no coordinated deploys, no waiting. The checkout team ships when they're ready. The search team ships when they're ready. Each deployment is isolated.
If any of these aren't true, you have split code sharing a deployment boundary, not microfrontends.
How WebKing runs this
We architect your frontend so each team (checkout, search, account, etc.) deploys on their schedule without blocking others or forcing a rebuild of the entire application.
Sources
The Lab is original analysis by WebKing. We summarize and interpret developments from the sources above for industrial, commercial, and small business owners. Figures are reported as published by their sources.
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