Loop Commerce had outgrown their theme. Sales were healthy, but every new merchandising idea meant fighting Liquid templates and watching the page get slower.
Challenge
Their storefront ran on a heavily customized Shopify theme stacked with apps. Each app injected its own scripts, and the cumulative weight made mobile pages sluggish — the exact place most of their traffic lived. Core Web Vitals were red, and the team had stopped shipping front-end changes because every one risked breaking something.
The constraints were clear:
- Keep Shopify for checkout, inventory, and the admin their ops team relied on
- Escape the theme without a risky big-bang cutover
- Make the front end fast enough that performance stopped being a tax on growth
What we built
We separated the storefront from the platform and rebuilt the presentation layer as a headless app.
- A Next.js App Router storefront pulling products, collections, and inventory from the Shopify Storefront API
- Static generation for catalog and content pages, with incremental revalidation so price and stock changes propagate in seconds
- Checkout handed off to Shopify, so PCI scope and the ops workflow stayed untouched
- Deployed on Vercel with edge caching, and a component library that lets the team ship merchandising changes without engineering
We migrated collection by collection behind a routing split, so traffic moved over gradually with no downtime.
"We can finally build the storefront we want without the page paying for it. Launching a campaign page used to take a week — now it's an afternoon." — Head of Growth, Loop Commerce
Results
Figures reflect Loop's post-launch measurements and are shared as an illustrative outcome.
- 3.1× faster median page loads, with Core Web Vitals moving into the green on mobile
- Measurable lift in mobile conversion off the faster experience
- Merchandising changes ship same-day instead of waiting on a release
Loop kept everything they liked about Shopify and got a front end that no longer holds the business back.
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