So now that you are certain a headless build is the best approach for your store, and you've contacted and contracted a service provider, how do you actually move forward? What do you do first to get the speed your customers require? As mentioned in the previous episode, one of the primary draws for going headless is the potential boost in speed you can bring to your store and the quickness and efficiency of your users experience. But how exactly do you achieve this boost in speed?

First, what  actually is site speed? We all know as users what constitute a fast or slow loading time for a site. It varies over time and with circumstance and expectation, bit it's a fine line that you feel more than know. Google and other aggregators however are a little more specific on how they define it, using a series of equations, primarily based on two factors: first contentful paint, and largest contentful paint. First contentful paint a score of how long it takes for the very first pixel to appear on a page once it loads, while largest contentful paint racks how long it takes from that moment until the largest aspect of the site is visible that the majority of the page can be considered loaded, even if additional minor details are still coming in.

Be sure to check your speed often, don’t just assume it’s working. Use a service like Lighthouse, and listen to the feedback from your customers to constantly gauge how well your store is operate as a site. 

While free services like Lighthouse will track this information on your initial landing page, they will not track further activity as your customer moves through your site. For that, you would require a provider like our sponsor Shogun, or other headless developers, who can help speed up your load time by as much as 43%.

What impact do third-party apps have on my speed? Third-party Shopify apps are and have been a fantastic collection of useful tools kind of haphazardly and patchwork put out there, and applied as store operators see fit. Some of them don’t work together, some of them are meant to work together and yet don’t, or people don’t bother to use them together, and some of them out right will not work or have to be manually adjusted under a headless build. This may seem like a lot of work, and a lot more complicated than it was when you were simply installing add-ons and moving forward, but in the long run this will make those add-ons work more effectively in efficiently. 

Do I need an in-house team, or can i just rely on my provider? Headless builds are really less about web development, treating your store like it's a traditional site, and more about programming and app development. You're not writing or designing a page that will load faster, you're changing how many individual apps behave and interact with each other. This requires specific but common enough expertise, and you should absolutely have at least someone on staff who knows how to make any changes or address any problems you may run into at any time. The more self sufficient your company is at implementing and managing your headless build, the more control you'll have over your site and the better chance you'll get exactly what you and your customers want out of it.

Going headless isn't just a matter of switching over to a one-size-fits-all build that is pre-optimized for your ease though, there are many small but important decisions that you'll have to make along the way to get the specific performance out of the site that you and your customers are looking for.  For instance, does your data tell you that the majority of users interact with items and aspects of your site that are near the top of the page? Then you can choose to not have some of the heavier parts of the page load, such as pop ups, images, active apps and other features, until the user themselves scroll to and engage with them. 

These small but important decisions will help you to tailor your site not just to some measurably faster speed, but to what feels faster to both you and your users, based on your own hands on experience and their evident behaviour. Headless builds allow you to focus on what parts of your site are the most popular and successful, and reorient your site's resources to best serve what works rather than wasting them on what doesn't.

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Mentioned in this episode:

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