Web components are a browser standard for creating your own reusable interface elements, such as a custom <rating-stars> or <search-box> tag. Each one packages its own HTML, CSS and behaviour into a single piece you can drop onto any page, in any framework, and it just works.
Think of them like LEGO bricks. A brick has a fixed shape and connectors, and you can snap it into countless builds without changing the brick itself. A web component is the same: define it once, then reuse it across pages and projects without rewriting the HTML, styling and logic each time. The shadow DOM keeps each brick’s internals sealed, so the CSS inside one component never accidentally restyles another.
The big advantage is independence. Because they are native to the browser rather than tied to one library, web components keep working even if a team later switches frameworks. That makes them useful for design systems shared across several products, where consistency matters more than any single tool.
They fit naturally with atomic design, where small parts combine into larger ones. A <search-box> might itself contain a custom button and input, each its own component, nested like blocks within blocks.
They are not the answer to everything, though. The same isolation that protects a component can make global theming and shared state more awkward than in a framework built for it, and the tooling around them is leaner than React’s or Vue’s. For a single app that will never leave one framework, plain framework components are often simpler. Web components shine when reuse has to cross those boundaries.
At TopDevs we use web components when a client has multiple sites or apps that should share the same buttons, forms and widgets without maintaining three separate copies.
