Shopify Plus Partner and Development Agency

Look at the page source for Liquid-generated markup and Shopify theme asset paths. A headless store will not have them, but its checkout will still run on a Shopify domain. Navigation that changes pages without a full reload is another strong signal, as is a front end served from a framework such as Next.js, Nuxt or Hydrogen.

Contentful is the most common choice among the brands covered here, used by Victoria Beckham Beauty, Bamford, Paul Valentine, ILIA and Allbirds. Sanity powers Recess and Nour Hammour, and Chilly's uses Commerce Layer. Hydrogen builds can manage content natively without a separate CMS, which is the route ATTITUDE took.

Smaller brands building a single custom storefront typically spend between $30,000 and $100,000 or more. Enterprise projects run from several hundred thousand into the millions. Add annual maintenance, CMS licensing, hosting and the internal development resource needed to keep two systems in step when you calculate total cost of ownership.

Not automatically. Shopify themes are fast by default, with 93% of Shopify brands rated as having a fast storefront and Shopify stores rendering 1.8x faster on average than stores on other platforms. A headless front end can be faster, but a poorly architected one is often slower. Speed is a reason to review your theme before it is a reason to decouple.

Apps that operate on the back end, covering areas such as inventory, subscriptions, loyalty and order management, generally continue to work. Apps that inject code into the theme to render something on the storefront will not, because there is no theme. Those need rebuilding against the app's API, which is a cost worth auditing before you commit.

The Storefront API is the data layer that any front end can query, regardless of framework or hosting. Shopify Hydrogen is an opinionated React stack built on Remix that consumes that API, with commerce components and utilities already built. Hydrogen is faster to start with, the raw Storefront API gives more freedom, and both use the same underlying commerce data.

For many brands, no. Online Store 2.0 sections, app blocks, metafields and custom Liquid closed much of the design gap, and Shopify Editions has since added checkout extensibility, markets tooling and native B2B. The case for headless now rests mainly on running several regional storefronts or on one specific feature a theme genuinely cannot support.