Why we stopped building standard Shopify templates for high growth brands
Shopify is a fantastic tool. It has democratized retail commerce and allowed thousands of founders to launch online storefronts in a weekend. But when an e commerce brand hits a certain scale, usually around 10,000 active visitors a day, standard Shopify templates start showing their limits.
At Sanmora, we've stopped building standard Liquid based Shopify themes for high growth merchants. Instead, we transition them to a headless commerce model.
The template bottleneck
Standard Shopify themes load everything in a monolithic bundle. Every app installed (reviews, currency converters, size charts) injects custom script tags into the theme header.
Over time, this results in a bloated website that feels sluggish. For e commerce, every 100ms delay in page load time can reduce conversion rates by up to 7%.
The Headless solution
With headless commerce, we separate the backend (Shopify managing inventory, cart, payments) from the frontend. We build a completely custom, static frontend using Next.js.
Speed: The website is pre rendered at build time. Clicking a product page feels instantaneous because there is no server side database query to wait for.
Design freedom: No longer constrained by the Liquid template structure. Designers can build any immersive layout they want.
Security: Since the public facing site is just static HTML/JS files, there is no direct database or server endpoint for hackers to target.
Transitioning to headless requires a development team to maintain, but for brands looking to scale their digital experience, it is the single best investment they can make.
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