Building A Blazing Fast Shopify Store: Liquid or Hydrogen?

Someone once told me, “You don’t really need your website to go that fast.” I knew what they meant.

I’d just spent five seconds waiting for Song for the Mute’s homepage to load. By any standard metric, that’s slow. But I didn’t care. When you’re browsing one of the coolest brands on the internet, and you really want to buy, you’re not timing it. You’re in it. You’re immersed. You’re seeing poetry, storytelling, and fashion blending perfectly together!

But most stores aren’t Song for the Mute.

And if your brand doesn’t have that kind of magnetic pull yet, performance matters — a lot. Google called it out years ago in their “Milliseconds Make Millions” report. Even today, 82% of users say slow speeds affect their purchasing decisions, and a 1-second improvement in page speed can yield an extra $7,000/day for a $100k/day site. Things haven’t changed.

Now, if you're using a traditional Shopify theme, built on Liquid and your site feels sluggish, your first instinct might be to install a performance app.

Don’t. Most of them do more harm than good. Others might suggest going headless. I build for Shopify Hydrogen, and even I’ll say this: don’t rush.

Can Shopify Liquid Perform Well?

Absolutely. Shopify published their own study in late 2023 showing that Liquid storefronts outperform most ecommerce platforms in Core Web Vitals.

As of September 2023, 59.5% of Shopify sites passed all CWV thresholds, a stat that continues to climb.

Even large-scale merchants like Rothy’s, Rad Power Bikes, and Dollar Shave Club use Liquid and still hit performance benchmarks.

Surprisingly, Liquid even outperforms most headless implementations. Shopify found that many SSR frameworks — the ones powering most headless setups — had fewer sites passing Core Web Vitals compared to Liquid. Hydrogen ranked second, but there’s still a gap.

So why invest millions in building Hydrogen?

Just why?

Hydrogen vs Liquid/Shopify Themes

A Rebuttal Against Liquid

First, I have to say that it might be hard to compare apples to apples in this case, mainly because the data in Shopify’s benchmark focuses on real storefronts using Hydrogen. Many of these early adopters built custom experiences without performance best practices. In contrast, Liquid storefronts benefit from:

Years of optimization by Shopify's core teams
Default themes like Dawn that are tightly optimized
A templating model that constrains performance pitfalls

Hydrogen, on the other hand, gives full freedom.

Yes, this freedom cuts both ways; it brings performance potential and risk of poor implementation. Hydrogen storefronts can match or exceed Liquid performance when built well. Shopify’s own documentation even notes:

“Some routes in the Hydrogen demo store template saw their load time cut in half” after optimizing GraphQL queries.

Hydrogen is built on React Server Components (RSC) and uses Vite for ultra-fast development. Shopify chose this stack specifically because:

RSC reduces client JS bundle size significantly
Pages stream in progressively with lower Time to First Byte (TTFB)
Data fetching is done on the server, not in the client render phase

You get full control. You also get full responsibility. That’s why some Hydrogen stores load in half the time, and others fall flat.

When Should You Consider Hydrogen?

Page speed shouldn’t be the only factor in deciding between Shopify Hydrogen and Liquid. The real choice comes down to how much control you need over your storefront experience.

If you’re planning to run A/B tests, personalize content, or build dynamic user interfaces, you’ll hit the limits of Liquid fast. Hydrogen is built for that kind of flexibility. It’s designed for brands that want to iterate quickly, experiment often, and optimize every touchpoint.

On the other hand, Liquid works well for stores that prioritize simplicity and stability. Its guardrails are a strength if your store setup is relatively fixed, maybe with just a few campaign landing pages here and there.

Use Hydrogen if:

Your store has 500+ SKUs or 100K+ visits/month, and you’re seeing speed decline.
You need to launch experiences that your theme can’t handle: multi-currency PWA, AR tools, immersive UIs.
Your team (or agency) is fluent in React and headless workflows

Stick with Liquid if:

You’re validating a new product or category
All your needs are covered within the theme editor, and your site already performs well
You don’t have the engineering support to maintain a custom frontend

The TL;DR

In short, Liquid gives you structure. Hydrogen gives you freedom. Choose based on how far you plan to push your storefront.

How To Build Hydrogen Storefronts Faster?

One of the biggest reasons developers hesitate to go headless is that it breaks the visual editing experience. The Shopify Theme Editor disappears. Content teams are locked out. Everything becomes a Jira ticket.

Weaverse fixes that.

With Weaverse Hydrogen, developers can build Hydrogen themes and components via an SDK, expose them in a familiar drag-and-drop editor, just like Shopify Theme Editor, and let content teams reuse, remix, and publish without touching code.

And it's only getting easier.

With Weaverse AI, the gap between idea and execution shrinks dramatically. Developers will soon be able to turn Figma design into Hydrogen landing pages using Weaverse and Figma MCP. Merchants will soon be able to edit their Hydrogen storefronts using a natural language interface.

If you’re interested in Weaverse AI, let me know here, and I’ll reach out once it’s ready!