Historically, headless storefronts forced merchants to become developers
As a turn-key ecommerce platform, Shopify is tough to beat because you don't need to spend any time worrying about your site infrastructure. While "going headless" helped merchants tap into more site speed and flexibility, building and maintaining a custom headless stack came with its own set of challenges:
- Maintenance — Developers need to build custom solutions and integrations from scratch. Your team can't manage your site without developer intervention. As a result, every site update or content launch takes longer and costs more.
- Infrastructure — Each update or change your team and your developers make increases the possibility of something breaking. One wrong decision can have negative consequences across the board.
No matter how you slice it, building and maintaining a custom headless stack takes up entirely too much time for your developers. Meanwhile, your marketing team can't respond to the mountains of data they're collecting on your site visitors and customers. By the time content updates are complete, marketing needs more changes, and the cycle continues.
Custom headless builds encourage complex site architecture
Going headless means that instead of working with a turnkey platform like Shopify, where your site architecture is built and maintained for you, you're stuck with DIY assembly. In other words, you're left maintaining your entire stack: headless content management system (CMS), hosting service, custom storefront, page builder, data orchestrator, and tons of custom third-party integrations.
Plus, if your headless stack (with the add-ons needed for customization) isn't implemented correctly, you may not see the faster page loads or boosted conversions you hoped for. Simply put: you're not getting the full ROI of going headless.
Marketing can't iterate fast enough to keep up with the data flow
What's more, a custom headless stack isn't user-friendly for non-developers. Custom builds mean your devs spend too much time making content changes that could be easily handled with a more user-friendly CMS.
By cutting marketing out of the loop, even the simplest tasks (i.e., launching sales, updating landing pages, publishing blog posts) require more planning and longer lead times. You lose agility when responding to incoming test data, market changes, supply chain disruptions, and customer demand.
Pack empowers brands with custom functionality and ease-of-use
Pack gives you full control over your marketing and content management, without the learning curve of a traditional headless approach. Meanwhile, your devs maintain the flexibility needed to keep your customer experience ahead of the pack.
Pack helps you:
- Speed up your site. Boost revenue with better SEO, faster page loads, and higher conversion rates.
- Maximize the ROI of Shopify. Pack unlocks the value of Shopify's entire functionality by making custom Hydrogen storefronts accessible and easy to use, regardless of your technical background.
- Keep content management simple. Pack uses a visual customizer and drag-and-drop components to make it easy for anyone to spin up a landing page, blog, or article.
- Speed up development timelines. Pack frees your developers from tedious builds for basic features. Pack comes pre-loaded with code libraries in the modern frameworks devs use most, so they get the same results faster – and with less code.
- Scale your content with no impact on site speed. Once you've done basic site speed optimizations, you can continue to add more apps and content without worrying about the impact on conversions due to slow page loads.
- Focus on business growth. Pack eliminates the work associated with stitching together a headless stack (e.g., CMS, hosting, page builder, custom third-party tools), so you can focus on growing your business.
In addition to a site speed and conversion rate boost—we've seen double-digit conversion rate lifts on most custom storefronts—take a look at our customers' real-world results:
- Liquid I.V. saw a 24% increase in CVR with a 12% increase in AOV.
- Public Rec increased conversions by 26% with a 10% boost to AOV.
Best of all, you can connect Pack to Shopify in minutes, and get a landing page up and running in hours (or a whole storefront in a matter of weeks). No need to wait for developers to create additional landing pages, blog posts, and articles. You can easily make changes to your site on the fly.
🚀 Should you go headless? Here's what you need to consider.
As brands scale, they face issues with load times, conversions, and overall site performance. But it's not a growth hack, and it can lead to a nightmare of maintenance for lean teams. Luckily, Shopify is changing the game with Hydrogen. This step-by-step guide walks you through why headless used to be the wrong path to take, and why it's time to re-evaluate it.