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Said MOUNAIM
Said MOUNAIM

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Level Up Your E-Commerce: Mastering Headless Architecture with Shopify and Next.js 16

I am excited to share my latest effort: building a fully custom, high-performance storefront for Shopify using a headless architecture powered by Next.js 16 (App Router).

The key benefit here is the ability to scale the frontend and achieve uncompromising speed, moving past the constraints of typical e-commerce platform themes.

Check out the live application's performance and the clean code structure on GitHub.

Live demo: https://terraceshop.vercel.app
Github repo: https://github.com/saidMounaim/terraceshop

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Peter Hallander

Nice project — headless with the App Router is a solid choice for performance control. One thing worth considering as you add more pages: Next.js Link prefetches on hover by default in production, but you can tune this with the prefetch prop. For large catalogs you may actually want to throttle it or make it viewport-triggered rather than hover-triggered, to avoid hammering the Storefront API for pages the user may never visit.

For anyone reading who can't go headless but still wants navigation prefetching on their Liquid theme: Chrome 109+ supports the Speculation Rules API which lets the browser speculatively render pages before a click — similar in concept to what you get from Next.js Link, but natively in the browser. I built a Shopify app around this (Prefetch - apps.shopify.com/prefetch) with hover/viewport fallbacks for non-supporting browsers and connection awareness so it skips prefetching on 2G or Data Saver. Disclosure: I'm the developer.