Headless Commerce

A Shopify store moved onto Hydrogen so the front end stops being the slowest part of the funnel — same catalogue, same checkout, a page that renders before the visitor gives up.

Timeline

12 wks

Industry

Direct-to-Consumer Retail

Service used

Commerce Build, Performance Engineering

Challenge

A theme-based storefront where every new section makes the first paint slower than the last

(nai™ — the problem)

A theme-based storefront gets slower with every section a marketing team adds, until the first paint arrives after the visitor has already decided to leave and the funnel leaks at the top.

A quiet studio desk at night, one live line on the monitor — Commerce Walkthrough
0:10 sec film

(nai™ — solution)

Moving a Shopify storefront off the theme onto Hydrogen

A theme starts fast and gets slower with every app, every section and every third-party script a team adds, until the storefront spends its first second fetching code instead of drawing the product.

Nothing here replaces the catalogue or the checkout. Only the front end.

A Hydrogen front end on React and TypeScript reads the same Storefront API the theme did, so products, variants and carts stay exactly where they are. Rendering moves to the server, the cart and the checkout keep Shopify’s own flows, and a page arrives as markup rather than as a queue of scripts.

A migration like this is planned around a short list of rules that do not move:

one Storefront API contract, front to back
server rendering for anything a crawler reads
images and fonts served at the size they render
a performance budget enforced in the build

Most of the work is the catalogue rather than the code. Collections, metafields, redirects and the shape of every URL have to land unchanged, because a storefront that renders quickly on new addresses has still lost its traffic.

The apps are the other half of it. Each one is either rebuilt against the API, replaced by something that runs on the server, or dropped on purpose, and that decision is taken app by app with the revenue it touches written down next to it.

Launch happens behind a redirect map and a rollback rather than on a Friday afternoon. Core Web Vitals are read from real sessions from the first day, so the number the build is held to is the one shoppers actually get.

What ships is a storefront the marketing team can still change on its own, on a front end where adding a section costs layout work rather than another second of load.

(nai™ — Technology Stacks)

Next.js

React

Node

Python

Shopify

(nai™ — our commitment)

On a storefront, performance is not a technical concern. It is the conversion rate, and we will hold the build to a number you can watch.