The case against headless (for most brands)
Hydrogen and PWA Studio are beautiful tools in the wrong hands. A short note on when to go headless and when to stop.
Headless is a fashion cycle. Five years ago it was the answer to every ecommerce brief. Today it is the answer to every ecommerce brief that has not been asked yet. Both positions are wrong. The real question is narrower than the discourse — and a lot of brands are being quietly sold a rebuild they do not need.
The three real reasons to go headless
- You run two or more storefronts from one back end, and the CMS needs to drive all of them
- Your in-house engineering team is strong and wants to own the frontend outright
- Your content layer is doing genuinely custom things — editorial, UGC, brand storytelling — that the stock theme cannot hold
Everything else is either a styling problem dressed up as an architectural one, or a sales pitch from an agency that bills by the quarter.
What you actually lose
“You do not buy Shopify and then run Shopify without the Shopify bits. That is called Next.js with a bill.”— Every conversation I have had this quarter about Hydrogen
Going headless trades a solved storefront for a frontend your team owns. You give up: the checkout that works out of the box, the app ecosystem that installs in one click, the theme editor that your merchandising team speaks, and the support path for all three. You gain: a frontend you can shape into anything. For most brands that trade is bad value. For some it is the right move. Know which you are.