Webshop with speed or integration demands, asking if headless commerce (Shopify Hydrogen, Medusa, Commerce Layer) makes sense.
Headless commerce splits frontend and checkout engine. It is a serious investment and only sensible with hard drivers: multilingual with different UX per market, custom B2B flows, or a frontend Shopify or Woo cannot keep up with. For a regular B2C SMB shop it is almost always overkill.
Try this first
- 1List the driver, not 'feels faster' but concretely. For example: 5 languages with different product catalogues, a B2B portal with customer-specific pricing, or an existing Next.js marketing site that needs checkout in it.
- 2Compare the three main routes. Shopify Hydrogen: Next.js-style frontend on Shopify checkout, fastest path if you already run Shopify. Medusa: open source, self-host, you keep everything in hand but build and host the checkout yourself. Commerce Layer or Saleor: API-first, subscription, watch the price tag for SMB.
- 3Actually run the numbers: licence, hosting, a frontend dev to build and maintain it, a backend dev for the connectors. Below 30k euro initial investment is rare, plus 500-1500 per month run-rate.
- 4Pull the PIM question in: with headless you often need a separate product catalogue source (Akeneo, Crystallize, or Shopify as PIM). Otherwise you are managing content in two places.
- 5Test SEO and internationalisation up front: with headless you own sitemap, hreflang, redirects and performance. No plugin fixes that for you.
- 6Start with a prototype on one product line or one market. A 4-6 week POC exposes 80% of the risks before you commit a full migration.
When to bring us in
If you cannot articulate which concrete problem headless solves, do not go headless. A well-tuned Shopify or WooCommerce with a fast host and a solid theme delivers the same results for most SMB shops at a tenth of the budget.
See also
- WordPress, plugins and theme have gone 6+ months without updatesOut-of-date WP is the number-one entry for malware. Don't just hit 'update all', back up first.
- Theme update broke the layout or threw a fatal errorThemes overwrite custom CSS on update unless you use a child theme.
- WordPress shows a blank screen after a plugin install or updateWSOD (white screen of death) is usually one crashing plugin. You isolate it.
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