Rafael Corrêa Gomes

Shopify Hydrogen Introduction

Shopify Hydrogen Beta

Headless is the new method to give you the freedom to apply customizations needed in an easier way. This Shopify Hydrogen introduction shows how to analyze this solution for your business.

If you want to learn how to code using Shopify Hydrogen, check out my Shopify Hydrogen development course helping you to get a layout from Figma and create a theme ready for production.

Before Hydrogen, we had some alternatives of using Headless architecture, you can check them in my previous article Enterprise Shopify headless architecture.

What do you need to know?

Before deciding to use Shopify Hydrogen you will need to challenge yourself about the business model you need. Try to start with these questions:

  • Do I have enough technical guidance and strategy?
  • What are the trade-offs?
  • Why I can’t use Liquid instead?
  • Could I add Hydrogen in a future implementation instead of the current phase?
  • My time is ready to start the new development stack?

After having these initial analyses your company will be able to measure the main points to make the right decision.

How it’s different from a traditional store?

Your traditional store involves less code, less cost of maintenance and more limits, Shopify Hydrogen has more flexibility and more cost of ownership too.

Your team might be very good at coding a traditional store and struggle to code this new Shopify headless model. These below are the development stack required for each store.

Dev stack – Shopify Store 2.0

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JS
  • Liquid

Dev stack – Shopify Hydrogen

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JS + React
  • APIs

Need help?

The implementation of Shopify headless via Hydrogen brings server setup and possible adjustments during the development phase, let me know if my team and I can help you with it.

About me

Rafael Corrêa Gomes

Rafael Corrêa Gomes

Senior e-commerce developer and architect based in Montreal, Canada. More than ten years of experience developing e-commerces, saas products and managing teams working with Magento, Shopify, PHP, JavaScript, and NodeJS.