RMG | Headless & Composable FAQ

Question 1

Should we go headless?

Accepted Answer

More often than the industry will tell you. The received wisdom that headless is only for enterprise dates from when every build started with an empty repository, six months, and a budget most brands could not justify. We productized the parts every storefront needs, so the starting point is a working Next.js storefront rather than a blank page. What that buys you is a page-speed ceiling a stock theme cannot reach, and Core Web Vitals feed directly into how you rank. The honest caveat is the retainer, not the build.

Question 2

Isn’t headless only worth it for large brands?

Accepted Answer

That was true, and it is the single most outdated belief in this part of the industry. It was true because the cost was a bespoke frontend architecture built from scratch for every client. Ours is built once and configured per brand, which is why a smaller brand can now have the same rendering performance as a company spending many times more. The threshold is no longer company size. It is whether organic search and conversion matter enough to your model to be worth a frontend you actually control.

Question 3

Does headless actually improve SEO?

Accepted Answer

It improves the things Google measures, which is the honest version of the claim. Core Web Vitals are a ranking input, and a decoupled frontend gives you control over rendering strategy, payload size, and what loads before the page is usable. A stock theme carrying a stack of third-party app scripts cannot get there no matter how much you optimize around the edges. Our headless builds run under a second: Anova and Probulin both do. The Brace Shop came up 62% on page speed. That is the mechanism, and it compounds because faster pages also convert better.

Question 4

How is this cheaper than a normal headless build?

Accepted Answer

Because you are not paying for the parts every storefront needs. Cart, checkout handoff, search, PDP and PLP architecture, CMS integration, and the rendering and caching strategy are built and maintained by us and configured for you. A bespoke build pays engineers to solve all of that again. The roadmap keeps improving and you do not pay for it twice. Timelines run about half what a from-scratch headless build takes, which is most of where the cost difference comes from.

Question 5

Which platforms does it connect to?

Accepted Answer

Shopify Plus, Adobe Commerce, and BigCommerce today, through their storefront APIs. Your catalog, orders, customers, and admin stay exactly where they are, so your team keeps the back office it already knows and merchandising does not change. The frontend is the only layer that moves. That also means going headless is not a replatform, and the two decisions should not be bundled together.

Question 6

What do we give up?

Accepted Answer

Two real things. Marketing can no longer drag a section around in the theme editor, so layout changes go through a developer or through the CMS blocks we configure for you. And any app that works by injecting a script into a hosted storefront will not work the same way, which means a handful of tools need a proper integration instead. We inventory both before the build so there are no surprises, and in practice the app question is smaller than it sounds because most of what those scripts do is better done server-side anyway.

Question 7

Who maintains it?

Accepted Answer

We do. That is deliberate, and it is the part of headless that goes wrong when an agency hands over a repository and moves on. Framework and dependency updates do not stop arriving, and a decoupled frontend with nobody assigned to it degrades faster than a theme. Our headless clients are on ongoing engagements, so the storefront gets the same patching and monitoring discipline as the platform behind it.

Question 8

What about PWAs? We were sold one years ago.

Accepted Answer

The label aged badly and the technology got absorbed. What was sold in 2019 as a progressive web app is now just a well-built modern storefront: fast, resilient on poor connections, app-like on mobile. We have shipped that architecture for years, on Magento for Hanky Panky and Petmo and on Next.js for LobsterGram. The capability is the same and better. What we would not do is keep selling it under a name that has stopped meaning anything to buyers.

Question 9

Can you design for a headless storefront?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it is the freest brief there is: no theme constraints, so the PDP, the PLP, and the content pages are designed for your catalog rather than around a template. The design system lives in code as a component library, built to Core Web Vitals targets from the first screen.

Question 10

Does a headless storefront help paid campaigns?

Accepted Answer

It helps the part of paid that most agencies cannot touch: the landing page. A storefront that loads in under a second converts more of the traffic you already paid for, and Quality Score rewards it. Email and SMS integrate through the commerce API, and the analytics instrumentation is the same as on every platform we run.

Headless
stopped being
expensive.

“Headless is
for enterprise.”

Then: six months and a bespoke frontend. Now: a storefront that already works

Then: performance was a nice-to-have. Now: it is a ranking input

Then: only enterprise could justify it. Now: the threshold is your model, not your size

Then: going headless meant replatforming. Now: your back office does not move

Still true: marketing loses the theme editor

Still true: the frontend needs an owner

Everything your store needs.
Headless.

A design system, not a theme

Built once. Configured for you.

Speed you can rank with

Meet PWA Accelerator.

Show you the money.

The issues you'll hit.
Handled.

Marketing loses the theme editor

Apps that expect a hosted storefront

SEO lost to client-side rendering

Stale prices and inventory from caching

Analytics wiring in a single-page app

The frontend nobody maintains

There’s a lot more
to this story.

Get them out
of the way.

Keeping
one of these?

Shopify

Adobe Commerce

BigCommerce

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Shopware

Headless now,
or next?
Start here.

Headless stopped being expensive.

“Headless is for enterprise.”