What is Hydrogen by Shopify, and how can it benefit my brand?

Shopify Hydrogen, is an ‘as-a-service headless commerce framework’, providing the benefits of creating efficiently custom storefronts that are still ‘powered by Shopify’, for leveraging the company’s backend to manage eCommerce. Hydrogen allows brands to ‘more effectively deliver controlled, performant, and dynamic experiences’ because a ‘headless setup separates the frontend from the backend, giving developers more freedom in design and development’. Traditionally, merchants would run Shopify on custom domains connected through a ‘gateway’ to Shopify’s own code, but the Hydrogen setup allows developers to build apps using modern frameworks such as React to provide unique UX optimised for speed, customisation, scale.

Benefits

Better Load Times

Hydrogen is built for speed with things likeshelf’ background preloading and distributed globally via Shopify’s Oxygen hosting solution. That means faster speeds which lead to increasing conversion rates and better SEO performance.

Greater flexibility

You can create bespoke customer journeys, integrate complex CMS tools such as Sanity, and serve content more dynamically (eg, A/B testing, content personalisation). This could work well for brands with complex user journeys, or product configurators.

More Efficient Development

Shopify’s pre-built components and utilities allow you to quickly get started with development, and will launch your products to market quicker than with traditional headless commerce stacks.

Stay in the Shopify ecosystem

It’s much easier to stay on the Shopify platform, creating less complexity and enabling use of Shopify’s features such as inventory, checkout and analytics.

For example, a recent case study noted that a luxury fashion brand, Nour Hammour, achieved a 63 per cent conversion rate lift and a 128 per cent year-on-year sales growth for their new Shopify Hydrogen storefront, demonstrating how Hydrogen is able to deliver performance and conversion

"We went with a headless architecture because it brings a lot of the customizations we wanted to control directly to our fingertips."

Director of Engineering, KOTN

• Shopify Documentation on Hydrogen