Service
Headless Shopify — and when it isn’t the right call
Shopify as the commerce backend, a separate front end for what Liquid genuinely can’t do.
Headless gets pitched as the default answer for any brand that wants to move fast, and for most Shopify merchants that pitch is wrong. Online Store 2.0 closed most of the speed gap that used to justify going headless on performance grounds alone, and a well-built Liquid theme can hit comparable Core Web Vitals numbers to a custom front end.
What headless actually costs is real: the theme editor goes away, so every content and layout change becomes a code change; most of the Shopify App Store stops working, because theme app extensions assume a Liquid theme exists to extend into; and you take on a second codebase, a second deploy pipeline, and a second set of things that can break.
How it works
Process
01
Scope
Work out honestly whether headless solves a real problem here, or whether a Liquid theme gets the same result for less.
02
Integrate
Wire the front end to Shopify’s Storefront API for catalogue, cart, and the checkout hand-off.
03
Instrument
Analytics, retargeting and SEO metadata, verified end to end across every market before launch.
What’s included
Deliverables
- Storefront API integration for cart, checkout and catalogue
- Multi-market or multi-storefront configuration where relevant
- Analytics and retargeting instrumentation
- SEO metadata pipeline for the front end
Questions
Questions we get asked
Is headless always faster than a Liquid theme?
No. A well-built Online Store 2.0 theme can match headless performance for most stores — the speed argument for headless is much weaker than it was a few years ago.
What do we lose by going headless?
The theme editor, mostly. Content and layout changes stop being something a merchandiser can do themselves and start being a deploy. Most theme-app-extension apps also stop working, since there's no theme for them to extend into.
When does headless actually make sense?
Multiple storefronts or markets on one Shopify backend, or a front end that genuinely needs to live apart from Shopify's templating — a marketing site with its own CMS, for instance. If neither applies, we'll say so.
More work