Performance

Performance is one of the decisive factors when choosing whether to build a traditional storefront or a headless one. There is a widespread perception that headless storefronts are faster. It is true that a traditional Shopify storefront comes with some limitations. For example, if a store requires any control over the URL structure of the pages, then the Online Store channel can offer very little flexibility.

That said, a traditional storefront can definitely be fast and the opposite – a custom headless storefront can be very slow. While a headless storefront is by no means a guarantee for low page loading times, it can provides the environment to achieve excellent performance results.

When considering which of the two approaches (traditional vs headless) will be the right one for the business, it’s important to thoroughly test and understand the impact of the performance metrics on the business results. What would be the financial benefit of improving the page load speed by 0.5 seconds on product pages? Would that offset the additional cost to maintain the headless build?