4 common headless commerce mistakes to avoid

By Steve Sewell

Headless commerce is gaining a lot of momentum, and for good reason! It's a modern way to significantly speed up your site, increasing conversions.

But, what a lot of people may not tell you, is there can be some major drawbacks if you don't follow some best practices. We've highlighted a few common pitfalls you should aim to avoid.

1. Going headless in one fell swoop

Despite what some may tell you, headless sites don't need to be built and launched in one fell swoop -- this is a big misconception. Instead, you can run an initial test to measure ROI quickly and cheaply by making just one page headless at a time.

We created a guide on how to migrate your site in a smart and incremental manner, and measure ROI as you go.

In short, we recommend:

Migrate incrementally

A/B Test ROI

Share Content

2. Using the wrong headless CMS

Your CMS is what lets non-developers create and edit content and pages across your site. What many don't know is, there is quite a bit of difference in terms of what each CMS option leaves you capable of.

Using the wrong headless CMS may make you overly dependent on developers to create, manage, and optimize content on your site, which can hinder your business' efficiency and growth.

This happens because most headless CMS's are very limited in what you can do with them.

But there is hope here - some CMS's like Builder.io were built to solve exactly this problem, striking an optimal balance between non-developer autonomy and developer customization and control.

Creating content with forms with limited CMS's

Visually editing a headless site in Builder.io

3. Using the wrong integrations

Going headless means you are building in a more modern and performant way. But sadly, this doesn't mean every tool you want to use on your site was built in such a fashion.

As a rule of thumb, always use API integrations and avoid Javascript integrations.

Today's Javascript integrations were built for legacy sites, and can harm your site's performance in a lot of ways, including blocking page load, downloading large and slow code, and in general just not being optimized for a headless site.

The downside, though, is API integrations can have developer overhead to setup. For an easy and powerful fix, check out HeadlessApp.Store, an upcoming library of fast, API-side ecommerce integrations

4. Taking the wrong advice

There is a dangerous trend we have noticed in the world of headless commerce -- people preaching that there is only "one way" to build a headless site, or preaching that only some ways are "true headless" and others are not. This is not true.

Our recommendation: do your own research, and talk to multiple sources. There are a lot of great resources out there, and if you'd like our recommendations as a data point, reach out to us.