Hosted is the correct default
If your catalogue is under a few thousand products, your pricing rules are simple and your team is small, a well-built hosted theme will outperform a rushed headless build on every metric that matters, including speed.
Four conditions that justify headless
We recommend headless when at least two of these are true. One on its own is rarely enough to cover the additional engineering cost.
- Content and commerce need to interleave on the same page
- You sell through several channels from one catalogue
- Your merchandising rules exceed what the platform admin allows
- Page speed is a measured, material driver of your revenue
Count the running cost, not just the build
Headless moves work from the platform to your team. Someone has to maintain the frontend, the deployment pipeline and the integrations. Budget for that from the start, or the second year will be unpleasant.