Work Headless
Hydrogen storefront
The store's previous headless build on Hydrogen and Oxygen — retired in 2025 when it moved back to a Liquid theme.
- Client
- Informatica
- My role
- Contributor
- Period
- 2023 — 2025
| Direction | Hydrogen / Oxygen → Dawn / Liquid | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | retired 2025, repo left public | |
| Reason | consolidate on core Shopify | |
Problem
Before the current theme, the store ran headless on Hydrogen. It worked, but for a small team it was more framework and more hosting to maintain than the result justified.
Constraints
A real storefront serving real traffic while the replacement theme was built alongside it.
Hard part
Deciding to walk away from a working headless build rather than keep investing in it.
Stack
- Hydrogen
- Remix
- Storefront API
- Oxygen
- Tailwind CSS
Links
What it was
A React storefront on Hydrogen and Remix, deployed to Oxygen, reading from the Storefront API. It’s the project where I learned how a headless Shopify build actually fits together — data fetching and caching, the shape of the Storefront API, the customer-account flow — and that knowledge still shows up in the theme work.
Why it was retired
The move back to a Liquid theme in 2024 was a judgement about fit, not a failure of the build. A theme is the more common path, better documented, and easier to hand over or hire for; the headless version’s advantages didn’t outweigh keeping a second framework and a separate deploy target alive for a team of one. The repo is left public as a reference.
What I’d keep from it
The discipline headless forces about what data a page actually needs. A Liquid template will happily render whatever’s in scope; a Storefront API query makes you name it.