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90+

Lighthouse Score

Case study · Fashion & Apparel

Hydrogen-Powered Headless Storefront for D2C Fashion

A Shopify Hydrogen storefront built for speed, conversion, and brand storytelling — achieving sub-1.5s LCP and a 25% lift in conversion rate.

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Project details

Client
D2C fashion brand (mid-market)
Industry
Fashion & Apparel
Timeline
10 weeks
Platforms
Custom theme → Shopify Hydrogen

The challenge

What we walked into.

The brand had outgrown its Shopify Liquid theme. Product pages loaded in 4+ seconds on mobile, Lighthouse scores hovered around 40, and the rigid template system made it impossible to deliver the editorial, story-driven shopping experience the brand's creative team envisioned.

Mobile accounted for 72% of traffic but only 38% of revenue — a clear signal that performance was killing conversion. The checkout flow was generic, the product discovery experience felt templated, and the brand was losing ground to competitors with faster, more immersive storefronts.

They needed a headless rebuild that could deliver both performance and creative freedom without sacrificing Shopify's operational benefits.

What we built

The engineering decisions.

Shopify Hydrogen Storefront

We rebuilt the entire frontend on Shopify's Hydrogen framework — React-based, server-rendered, and deployed to Oxygen for edge delivery. Every page is streamed with Suspense boundaries, meaning users see content instantly while data loads in the background.

Editorial Shopping Experience

The brand's creative team needed full control over how stories and collections were presented. We built a custom content system using Shopify metafields and metaobjects that lets the team create immersive, magazine-style collection pages without touching code.

Performance-First Architecture

Image optimization with automatic WebP/AVIF conversion and responsive srcsets. Critical CSS inlined, JavaScript code-split by route. Prefetching on link hover. The result: sub-1.5s LCP on 4G connections and 90+ Lighthouse scores across every page.

Optimized Checkout & Cart

A slide-out cart with real-time inventory checks, dynamic upsell recommendations based on cart contents, and Shopify's checkout extensibility for branded post-purchase flows. Cart-to-checkout drop-off decreased measurably.

The results

Measured outcomes.

90+

Lighthouse score (all pages)

1.4s

LCP on mobile (4G)

25%

Conversion rate lift

  • Lighthouse scores improved from ~40 to 90+ across all page types
  • Mobile conversion rate lifted 25%, closing the desktop-mobile revenue gap
  • LCP dropped from 4.2s to 1.4s on mobile — a 67% improvement
  • Editorial collection pages increased time-on-site by 40%
  • Cart-to-checkout drop-off reduced by 18% with optimized slide-out cart

The engineering behind this

Fashion & Apparel CommerceThe vertical this work sits in.Shopify Plus DevelopmentThe platform behind the build.Commerce PerformanceThe speed work that carried it.

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