A headless Hydrogen storefront rebuilt route by route.
How two vetted Code Elevator engineers move a fast-growing outdoor DTC brand off a strained Liquid theme and onto a headless Hydrogen storefront, route by route, with no big-bang cutover.
What they were up against
The brand had quietly outgrown its Liquid theme. Three years of app installs, one-off sections, and holiday patches had pushed mobile time-to-interactive far past the point where it costs revenue, and every seasonal traffic spike widened the gap between the site's speed and the brand's momentum.
The damage showed up at the worst possible moment: checkout. Abandonment climbed steadily through the funnel, and the team had run out of theme-level levers to pull. They needed to move to a headless architecture, but without a risky big-bang cutover, and without prying merchandising control out of the marketing team's hands.
How we scoped and staffed it
We started with a two-week audit: instrument the funnel, profile the theme, and rank every fix by revenue impact per engineering week. That triage made the case obvious, the highest-leverage work sat on the product, collection, and checkout paths, so those became the migration's first routes.
Then we staffed lean and senior. Two vetted Code Elevator engineers, one on the Hydrogen front end, one on data and integrations, embedded directly in the brand's own sprint cadence. No hand-offs, no agency layer between the people writing code and the people who owned the roadmap.
What we actually shipped
The new storefront runs on Hydrogen and Remix, served from Vercel's edge, with Shopify Plus kept as the single source of truth for catalog, pricing, and checkout. Pages moved over route by route behind feature flags, so traffic shifted gradually and every release was measured against the old path before it went fully live.
We rebuilt the merchandising layer on top of a structured content model, so the marketing team kept full editorial control without touching code. And we re-instrumented the funnel from the ground up (real-user metrics, not lab scores), so the wins were provable rather than promised. Sixteen weeks after kickoff, the last Liquid route was retired.
Four clients, on camera.
Why he brought his development work to Code Elevator.
A B2B wholesale portal built to replace spreadsheet order entry.
A multi-region storefront serving four currencies from one codebase.
A headless rebuild for a storefront carrying a heavy ad budget.