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Discussion on: Modern Shopify theme development

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Peter Hallander

Shopify Theme Lab looks like a solid escape from the officially-neglected tooling maze — the Vue + Tailwind combo with remote reloading is exactly the kind of DX that makes theme work enjoyable rather than painful.

One thing worth wiring in once you have a theme scaffold like this: navigation prefetching. On hover, you start fetching the next page in the background, so by the time the click lands the page is already in the cache. The perceived navigation speed improvement is dramatic on product-heavy stores, and since it runs on hover (not on load), it doesn't touch your Lighthouse scores at all.

I built a Shopify app called Prefetch (apps.shopify.com/prefetch) that does this automatically — I'm the developer, so full disclosure there. It's the kind of thing that's straightforward to add as a snippet to any theme build.