The 2021-2023 Headless Promise

Between 2021 and 2023, going headless was the "serious" choice for Shopify merchants. The pitch was compelling: decouple your storefront from Shopify's theme architecture, host a React app on Vercel or Netlify, and unlock performance and UI flexibility that themes simply couldn't deliver. At the time, this wasn't wrong—Shopify themes had real limitations. You couldn't even reuse a section across multiple templates, in fact, you could only use sections on the home page.

Agencies pushed headless hard, and not entirely for noble reasons. I saw it at every shop I worked at: headless builds meant longer timelines, which meant bigger contracts. Building from scratch with APIs is slow. That was good for business.

What didn't get discussed as openly was the maintenance trap. When you go headless, you're also responsible for building the CMS that lets merchants update their own content. Every new feature means hiring a developer to build the UI, connect it to the CMS, and train the merchant. For some teams this was manageable. For many, it became a recurring cost that dwarfed the original build.

What's Changed: Shopify's Quiet Infrastructure Revolution

In 2021, Shopify released Online Store 2.0, and it solved most of what merchants actually needed. Sections worked everywhere, not just the homepage. You could create reusable templates without touching code. And app integration finally made sense—instead of the old ScriptTags API or asking merchants to paste code snippets into their theme files, 2.0 introduced app blocks. Install an app, drop the block into your page, done. No developer required.

Performance got serious attention too. Every Shopify engineer I've worked with will tell you the same thing: they haven't seen a headless build that outperforms a well-built 2.0 theme. Shopify made the best option the easiest one.

Then in 2022, Shopify acquired Remix.

If you're not familiar: Remix is a React framework built by Michael Jackson and Ryan Florence, two devs with serious credibility in the React ecosystem. (I went to their workshop in New York once—genuinely cool people who answered every dumb question I threw at them.) Shopify didn't just acquire the framework; they wove it into their entire infrastructure. It now powers Hydrogen, their headless stack. More importantly for most developers, it completely changed how you build custom apps.

Before Remix, spinning up a Shopify app was a gauntlet. You needed to configure tunneling, set up hosting, wire up OAuth, connect your frontend to your backend—real full-stack work before you wrote a single line of business logic. It filtered out a lot of developers who didn't have that infrastructure experience.

Now? You run a few CLI commands and you're developing an embedded Remix app inside a dev store in under five minutes. The barrier basically disappeared.

Web components closed the last gap. The interactive, stateful UI that used to require React now works natively in the browser—inside any Shopify theme, no headless architecture required. For developers, it's the same component model they wanted. For merchants, it's one less reason to pay for a custom build.

In 2026, the choice is easy

Shopify 2.0 themes with Remix-powered apps. That's the pattern.

The CLI workflows are fast, the Remix integration is mature, and anything you'd reach for headless to solve—custom UI, complex logic, interactive features—you can build as an embedded app without decoupling your entire storefront.

If someone's still pitching headless in 2026, ask them: what are you getting that 2.0 can't do? In most cases, the answer is a longer timeline and a bigger invoice.

Better for merchants. Better for developers. Shopify made the best option the easiest one—use it.