Why Adopt Shopify Hydrogen Development for Headless eCommerce?

Traditionally, the adopted architecture for eCommerce development is monolithic. Here, the frontend is tightly coupled with the backend. And it is because the maximum traffic is coming from the desktops.

But in today's commerce, there are multiple touchpoints for a customer. It can be a mobile application, POS (Point of Sale) or even chatbots. And it often requires the information to be presented differently at every touchpoint. And it can be achieved by the headless.

Headless is an architecture where the frontend is separate from the backend. And different touchpoints are connected via APIs.

Hydrogen launched for Shopify headless development

Hydrogen is a React-based framework. It was first previewed in the Shopify Unite 2021. It enables the building of custom storefronts for Shopify.

Now, Hydrogen is available in the developer preview. That allows the developers to build custom storefronts quickly. In a few clicks, developers can set up React components to build the foundation of the eCommerce store.

Introduction to Shopify Oxygen

Shopify Oxygen also launched in Shopify Unite 2021. It is a platform that allows hosting custom Hydrogen storefronts directly on Shopify.

Shopify is investing heavily in the development of the Global infrastructure of Oxygen. And the aim is to provide more than 100 server locations globally. That helps reduce the load time of the website.

It can help to handle a high volume of traffic on your website. This leads to easily complete a flash sale or a high volume social media campaign.

Why adopt Hydrogen for headless development?

Hydrogen is for the merchants that previously traded off some aspects in their development process. Typically it is between the performance and the dynamic and rich experience of the website.

In website development, developers need to make choices to comprise a final vision of the customer experience of the website.

Hydrogen provides different technologies to build a dynamic shopping experience without trading off the performance.

Hydrogen enables a quick build environment for the developers. And that is powered by Vite, Typescript, and Tailwind CSS.

Advantages of adopting Shopify Hydrogen development

There are advantages which a developer will get by adopting the Shopify Hydrogen development. Some of them are as follows :

Quick to start:

Hydrogen provides two different templates to quickly build the custom Shopify storefront. The first template is "Hello World", a minimal template for building the storefront from the very beginning.

The second one is "Demo Store", a full-featured template. It provides a complete purchase journey out of the box.

Improved site speed:

Hydrogen provides below options for performance optimizations :

• Build-in caching controls
• Server-side rendering
• React server components

Added design flexibility:

Shopify Hydrogen development process follows the headless approach. That enables more freedom towards the implementation of the design.

Fast development:

Shopify Hydrogen development uses Shopify's functional tech stack and commerce skills in the development process. And it interacts directly with the storefront APIs. That accelerates the development process.

Final Words

Hydrogen is creating a buzz in the developer community since its first announcement. As more eCommerce websites adopting headless eCommerce architecture, it is easy for the developers to move ahead with Hydrogen.

Once Hydrogen is combined with Oxygen, the site's performance will improve significantly. And it will give freedom to develop more dynamic websites without any performance tradeoff.

Carmella is an experienced Digital Marketing Professional with a demonstrated history of working in the digital marketing industry. I have a proven track record in Seo, Social Media, Adword, and Content Marketing.