Why not to use iframes for embedded dashboards

Summary

The user experience of an embedded analytics dashboard is critical for just about everyone in the data analytics process. Today’s users expect a smooth UI and UX, developers want the embedding process to be easy, and lastly, your business’s bottom line depends on both of those audiences being happy.For a long while, embedding dashboards into software applications or websites meant using iframes. While they can work in a pinch, they force you to make many compromises that ultimately hurt the end-user.Today, we’ll explain why iframes are not the right way to embed dashboards into your customer-facing application.What are iframes?In web development, iframes (short for inline frames) are HTML elements used to embed another HTML page within the current page. They act as a window to a separate website/document, which is loaded independently of the parent page.It looks something like this:<iframe src="https://example.com" width="600" height="400"></iframe>Iframes are commonly used for:Integrating analytics dashboards or third-party widgetsEmbedding YouTube videosDisplaying external websites or toolsLoading ads or analytics widgetsThey have a few main characteristics.The embedded content is sandboxed from the parent site, meaning you often can't easily manipulate it with JavaScript or CSS from the parent document.It operates in a separate browser context, like a mini browser inside a page.It has its own scrollbars, rendering rules, and sometimes its own security policies.Over time, iframes’ popularity has decreased and in their place, developers have started using API-based integrations or SDKs for embedding. The reason is simple: iframes are just not a good solution for embedding, especially analytics dashboards in your product.Here are some of the main reasons why you should stay away from iframes as an embedding method.It doesn’t look very goodAn iframe loads its isolated document, so your global style sheets, CSS variables, icon fonts, and motion guidelines never reach ...