Headless Shopify builds have become a huge trend in recent years, with major e-commerce players such as Allbirds, Peloton and Victoria Beckham Beauty all adopting headless architecture for their customer-facing sites. As a business owner, figuring out the best move for your Shopify store can be super daunting – with hundreds of articles debating the pros and cons of headless builds vs Liquid, the more traditional approach to building Shopify stores, you might be wondering whether it’s worth jumping on the headless bandwagon or not.

Let’s first define what we mean by “headless” builds. The anatomy of a Shopify site can be broken down into two key components; the backend, where merchants create products, manage orders and view key performance statistics, and the frontend, where customers view pages and purchase products. You can think of this like a restaurant; you have the kitchen where the food is prepared by chefs (ie: the backend), and the dining room where the food is eaten by customers (ie: the frontend). As developers, our job is to take information from the backend and display this on the frontend, similar to how servers in restaurants bring food from kitchen to table. When building with Liquid, Shopify’s coding language, our “kitchen” is already set up with all the facilities we need to make a huge array of dishes, but sometimes maybe this isn’t quite specific enough – what if our restaurant specialises in BBQ, but our kitchen doesn’t have a smoker? Headless builds, by contrast, allow us to completely customise our kitchen with the exact tools we need, offering us more flexibility but requiring more specialist knowledge and investment.

In this article, we'll walk through the pros and cons of both headless and traditional builds in plain language, helping you understand which option might work best for your specific business needs, budget, and growth plans. We'll focus on practical considerations like setup costs, ongoing maintenance, and how each option might impact your customers' shopping experience.

Shopify themes are pre-designed templates that determine how your online store looks and functions. These themes are built using Liquid, Shopify's templating language, which connects a store's backend data (products, collections, blog posts, pages and more) with the frontend that customers see. When using a traditional Liquid-based approach, merchants can choose from hundreds of themes in the Shopify Theme Store or work with a developer to create a custom theme.

The beauty of using Liquid themes is that everything can be configured directly from the Shopify admin. Most theme content is edited via the Theme Editor, a user-friendly visual interface that allows store owners to customise copy, layouts, colours, fonts and other aspects of a theme’s appearance with a real-time preview. When paired with metafields and metaobjects, which extend Shopify's data structure by allowing us to add extra information about products, collections, pages and more, the Theme Editor becomes a powerful page-builder tool that allows non-technical users to create professional-looking storefronts with ease.

Pros

1. Well-Documented and Widely Supported

Shopify offers numerous help articles around editing the content of Liquid themes, making it easy for merchants, marketers, designers, and other non-technical users to pick up. While Shopify’s support for custom Liquid themes can be somewhat limited, finding developers familiar with the Liquid ecosystem is relatively simple, meaning any bug fixes or new features can be added with ease.

2. Extendable via Shopify Apps and Integrations

Merchants using Liquid themes have access to the Shopify App Store, which contains thousands of applications designed to enhance the functionality of Shopify stores. With apps covering everything from improving product discovery to increasing marketing reach and conversions, this is a great option for merchants looking to extend their store's capabilities without requiring complex custom development work.

3. Highly Performant

Liquid builds benefit from Shopify’s speedy content delivery system, which automatically optimises performance through effective caching and intelligent asset loading. With globally distributed servers and regular performance updates, merchants never have to worry about stores being unable to handle customer demand.

4. Cost-Effective

Compared with headless, Liquid builds require less initial investment. All merchants need to get started is a subscription to one of Shopify’s plans and a specialist theme developer, as well as any apps or integrations.

5. Still Very Flexible in Terms of Design and Functionality

Although Liquid builds are mostly limited to the functionality of Shopify’s ecosystem, they still offer a great deal of flexibility in terms of branding and design, particularly in the hands of an experienced developer.

1. Content Entry Processes can be Convoluted

Editing content in Liquid themes often creates a fragmented workflow for merchants. Unlike headless solutions, where content is typically managed in a singular system, the content of Liquid themes is managed across multiple areas of the Shopify admin; requiring merchants to navigate between the main admin panel, metafields / metaobjects sections, and the theme editor to make comprehensive updates. This distributed approach can lead to confusion about where specific content lives and how different elements connect, especially for non-technical users.

2. Not Ideal for Non-e-Commerce Content

Liquid is second-to-none when it comes to creating e-commerce experiences, but Shopify’s support for other content can be limited; although it’s perfectly possible to create articles and pages within the Shopify admin, the content-entry system for these can be somewhat difficult to use, especially at scale. For this reason, merchants wishing to prioritise more long-form content, rather than a traditional product-centric approach, should consider switching to headless for a more flexible content-entry system.

3. Harder to Scale

Although Liquid builds can be easier to set up than headless, they can also be tricky to scale – particularly without proper goals, budget and timeline. Modifying existing themes can create conflicts with previous customisations, and these can be difficult to manage without the expertise of the developer who originally built the theme. As a store owner, it’s imperative to consider what functionality you might need as your business scales, and communicate this with the developer building your Liquid theme; otherwise, you may eventually become limited by the theme’s architecture and functionality, resulting in a costly rebuild.

When it comes to core e-commerce functionality, Shopify truly is the best option for most merchants; its robust infrastructure excels in critical areas such as inventory tracking, checkout processes, payment options, and comprehensive marketing tools for customer engagement. When it comes to building out custom storefronts, however, Shopify’s content-entry system may not be flexible or scalable enough for merchants in need of specialist or particularly nuanced functionality.

Headless builds offer store owners a way to capitalise on Shopify’s powerful e-commerce capabilities, without having to rely on the platform’s frontend tooling. This involves using Shopify to create products, track inventory, mange orders and track sales performance, but relying on an external content management system (CMS) to populate the content of the customer-facing site.

1. Streamlined Content-Entry

Headless builds are a great option for merchants who make frequent updates to the copy, imagery and layout of their frontend stores, as the process of uploading content can be completely tailored to individual workflows. This also makes it a solid choice for users who are less technologically-capable.

2. Complete Frontend Flexibility

Decoupling the frontend store from Shopify's backend platform gives us the freedom to create unique customer experiences using modern frontend technologies like React, Vue, or Next.js. Developers can implement complex animations, custom checkout flows, and personalised shopping experiences that would be difficult or impossible within the constraints of Liquid themes.

3. Great Performance

While there’s some debate about whether headless builds offer better site speeds than those hosted directly on Shopify’s platform, there’s no doubt that headless is extremely performant. The technology can even be leveraged to create Progressive Web Applications (PWAs), which offer features like offline functionality, push notifications, and faster load times to create a more seamless shopping experience across devices.

1. Higher Cost

With headless builds requiring external web hosting and CMS services, in addition to a paid Shopify plan, the ongoing cost of maintaining these stores tends to be higher than those built with Liquid. Given the complexity involved in building a custom content-entry system, the initial development cost of headless builds can also be higher – up to 2-3 times in some cases. For larger merchants with specific needs and dedicated development resources, these costs may be justified by the benefits, but smaller merchants should carefully consider whether the investment aligns with their business goals and budget.

2. Decreased Compatibility with Apps and Marketing Tools

Headless builds don’t benefit from the Shopify App Store, which can make it harder to implement features such as product reviews, store locators, age verifications, and other specialist functionality that is usually handled by third-party apps. While this can often be circumvented by having a developer custom build these features, the time and cost associated with this can be significant. Marketing-heavy merchants, or those looking to customise their storefronts without development assistance, should strongly consider a Liquid build instead.

3. Can be Harder to Maintain

Given that headless builds require more specialised development skills, it's unsurprising that these tend to be more difficult to maintain than their Liquid counterparts. Finding developers with the necessary expertise to troubleshoot and update headless architectures can be challenging, especially for smaller merchants without dedicated technical teams. With no standardised approach to headless implementations, each build may use different frameworks and methodologies, making knowledge transfer between developers more complicated.

Headless builds present incredible opportunities for merchants to create unique shopping experiences, but this functionality definitely isn’t for everyone; liquid builds offer a more accessible, cost-effective solution that works exceptionally well for the vast majority of merchant needs.

As a Shopify development studio specialising in both traditional and headless builds, we at Baggy advise you to consider your specific business needs, technical capabilities, budget constraints, and long-term goals. For content-heavy sites, those prioritising unique user experiences, and merchants with the budget to support ongoing development, headless may be the ideal choice. For those seeking a balance of flexibility, performance, and cost-effectiveness with minimal technical overhead, Liquid remains the solid foundation upon which to build your Shopify store.

If you have a project you’d like to discuss, or any further questions about which build type is right for you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.