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Last updated on June 19th, 2026
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When to use a headless Shopify website?
This decision has shifted over the years, and Shopify’s platform has greatly improved since the concept of a headless store entered the market, but at it’s core - people move to headless stores to escape Shopify’s content management and presentation limitations.
At it’s simplest, a headless website is a collection of technology platforms - each selected for their strengths. Shopify is a complete ecommerce solution that integrates with 3PLs and other marketplaces. NextJS has become the leading frontend platform for highly interactive websites. Sanity is the front runner - by a wide margin - for shipping custom content for brands with multiple platforms.
So, why would someone pick headless? I’m going to divide this into two sections, both generic and specific to your use case:
EVERGREEN:
- Headless hosting platforms (e.g. Vercel) utilize CDNs and ADNs to deliver content close to the end user. This means faster websites.
- Many merchants who move to headless have experienced grievances with disjointed content management with custom blog posts, strange product description formats, metafields, and theme editors. Shopify has improved this over the years, but the experience is largely the same. In the headless world, you can reuse, duplicate, and compose pages like it’s a Squarespace template made just for you. Website content is easier and clearer to manage.
- Shopify only really has the concept of pages, collections/products, and blog posts. All other data types are faked with a combination of metafields and theme editing. Sanity is built such that anything can be content: ingredients, authors, playlists, shipping regions, subscription plans. These things can be pulled in to present on the website, can translate to logic on the backend for making business decisions. Content is idiomatic and composable.
- Sometimes merchants want to test different content on the website to see how it performs. With 3PLs, you run into all sorts of SKU/inventory syncing issues when multiple products refer to the same physical inventory. With headless, we can make multiple pages refer to the same Shopify product, alleviating this issue. Headless makes testing content easier.
- With Shopify, editing the homepage is editing the homepage. People get around this will convoluted theme duplication. In the headless world, we can build out all sorts of landing pages, header/footer changes, pop up banners, and switch them all at once - say for Black Friday. Layouts are easily swappable.
CLIENT SPECIFIC
In addition to the above general-purpose reasons, here are some examples of how a headless set up would benefit you in a website refresh: