Site Genesis – Definition

The original reference architecture provided by Salesforce Commerce Cloud as a starting point for building e-commerce sites.

Site Genesis was the foundation for SFCC implementations for many years before being superseded by SFRA. Many existing SFCC sites still use Site Genesis architecture. For retailers still running Site Genesis, the practical implications go beyond nostalgia: Salesforce has shifted its own development focus and much of the partner ecosystem's tooling toward SFRA and newer composable approaches, meaning Site Genesis implementations increasingly rely on aging documentation and a shrinking pool of developers with deep familiarity. Migrating from Site Genesis to SFRA, or further to a PWA Kit-based composable architecture, is a substantial undertaking, not a simple upgrade, since the two architectures organize code, templates, and business logic quite differently. From a content perspective, a Site Genesis migration is also an opportunity to evaluate whether the content management approach in use still fits the business's actual publishing needs, rather than simply porting the existing setup forward unchanged.