The Evolution and Redesign of Taobao PC Homepage

At the end of May 2022, Taobao launched a brand‑new PC homepage. The article recounts the difficulties before and after the redesign and outlines the technical roadmap of the PC team.

Since 2015, Alibaba’s “ALL‑IN‑Wireless” strategy has dramatically reduced PC traffic; daily active users on the PC homepage fell by almost tenfold. Many legacy features became “empty shells”, causing frequent 404 errors and poor user experience.

The redesign was driven by a veteran front‑end engineer (nicknamed Yongba) who, after more than 2,000 days on the homepage, began planning a comprehensive overhaul.

Key challenges included severe resource scarcity, fragmented legacy code, and an outdated tech stack that lacked gray‑release and rollback capabilities. The team often had to dig through decade‑old PHP and JavaScript files, such as the following legacy script:

/*
Copyright 2010, KISSY UI Library v1.0.5
MIT Licensed
build: 524 Apr 6 09:10
*/
/**
 * @module 旺旺亮灯脚本
 * @author 玉伯
 * @depends ks-core
 */

Modernizing even a simple search box required two weeks of work due to missing documentation and unclear ownership.

The redesign pursued three main goals: (1) improve product usability, (2) upgrade product capabilities (e.g., Web‑based WangWang chat), and (3) achieve a full‑scale technical upgrade that enables multi‑platform architecture. The team introduced a unified front‑end platform that can migrate features from the mobile app to PC/H5 within weeks.

Team composition grew to about 20 engineers covering the core front‑end of Taobao (homepage, feed, detail pages, transactions, messaging). They emphasized user‑centric decisions, refusing unnecessary login prompts and insisting on consistent experiences across devices.

Technical upgrades also addressed infrastructure issues: the old PC stack could not support gray releases or rollbacks, forcing the team to redeploy entire pages for any bug fix. The new architecture supports incremental releases, multi‑end compatibility, and better performance.

Future work includes redesigning the PC product detail page (2.0) and upgrading the site‑wide search, aiming to keep Taobao’s PC experience on par with mobile innovations.