Headless storefronts, for when the theme is the bottleneck.
Going headless is a trade: you gain complete control of the front end and take on the work a theme was doing for you — routing, caching, previews, SEO plumbing and the operational surface behind it. It pays off when the storefront is genuinely the constraint: bespoke merchandising, a content model no theme section can express, markets and B2B rules that need real logic, or performance you cannot reach by removing apps.
We build these on Hydrogen and Oxygen, or on Remix and Astro against the Storefront API when Oxygen is not the right host, and we treat Core Web Vitals as a gate in CI rather than a postmortem. If a theme would serve you better, that is what the 48-hour answer will say.
What the engagement actually contains.
Hydrogen, Remix or Astro front ends over the Storefront API when the theme stops being the bottleneck you can style your way out of.
- 01
Hydrogen / Oxygen or a custom React front end
Product, collection, search, cart and checkout hand-off built on the Storefront API, deployed either on Oxygen or on infrastructure you already run.
- 02
Markets, currencies and B2B
Localised catalogues, prices and content, plus B2B catalogues and company accounts where the buyer is a company rather than a person.
- 03
Metaobject-driven content
A content model your marketing team edits in the Shopify admin — not a second CMS with its own login, its own bill and its own drift.
- 04
Performance as a build gate
Budgets enforced in CI: image policy, font strategy, hydration boundaries and third-party scripts weighed against what they earn. A regression fails the build instead of the quarter.
- 05
The SEO plumbing a theme gave you free
Canonical URLs, structured data, sitemaps, redirects from the old URLs and pagination that crawlers can follow — the part of headless that quietly costs traffic when it is skipped.
Where we have already done this.
Our own catalogue, not a case study written for this page. Every name below is public software you can open right now.
This site
Static Astro, self-hosted fonts, inline SVG, zero external requests and no tracker — the same performance discipline, applied to our own marketing page.
Sitematic
Our own no-code website builder: visual editing, multi-tenant hosting and custom domains, which is the headless problem from the other side.
Shopping Master
A store builder we operate — checkout, payments, shipping and a customisable storefront, built and run end to end.
What people ask before starting one of these.
Is headless going to make our store faster?
Only if the theme is what is slowing it down. A well-built theme with disciplined app usage often beats a headless build that ships a heavy JavaScript bundle. We measure first and tell you which one you have — the answer is frequently "fix the theme".
What happens to our SEO when we replatform the front end?
It is the main risk, and it is manageable: a URL-for-URL redirect map, structured data and canonicals carried over, sitemaps regenerated, and crawl behaviour checked before the cutover rather than after the traffic drop.
Can marketing still edit the site?
Yes — that is what the metaobject content model is for. Pages, sections and campaign content stay editable in the Shopify admin your team already uses, without a developer deploy for a copy change.
More general questions — cost, ownership, what happens after launch — are answered on the home page FAQ.
Have a headless & storefronts project?
Send the spec and an engineer answers within 48 hours — how we would build it, the rules that apply, and a price. The first working build follows days later, not quarters.
- A costed answer within 48 hours
- A working build you can click in days, not quarters
- Fixed price or T&M, quoted before we start
- Server, domain, SSL and monitoring handled — or shipped into your cloud
- You own the repo, the Partner account and the infrastructure
Prefer the company site? devcloudsoftware.com