Shopify gets you selling in a week. A year later you're paying $300/mo in plugins and loading in 8 seconds on mobile. Custom e-commerce sites that load in under a second, rank on Google, and convert on checkout — on the platform that fits your business, not the one that fits a template shop.
Every plugin is another script blocking the page, another $10–$30/mo subscription, another attack surface. The initial build was fast. A year in, the site is slow, expensive, and you're paying rent to someone else's code.
You can optimize landing pages all day, but if checkout is 4 Shopify screens of 'oops something broke' and 'please create an account,' half the carts die on the way to payment.
No product schema, no rich results, no proper canonical URLs, pagination eats your crawl budget. Google can't rank what it can't understand, and your organic traffic plateaus around month 3.
Headless Shopify, Medusa, or custom — whichever fits. Fast frontend in Astro or Next.js that loads in under a second and doesn't care how many products you have. Zero plugin rot.
Custom checkout (when the platform allows) or aggressively tuned native checkout. One-page, guest-friendly, with every tested conversion pattern — abandoned-cart recovery, upsells, trust badges, the real stuff.
Product schema + Offer schema + Review schema on every product. Rich results in Google. Proper canonical handling so variants don't compete with parents. Google Shopping feed built clean from day one.
A local clothing boutique wanted to sell online without the fees of marketplaces like Etsy.
What we did: Custom Shopify build with Instagram feed integration, local pickup option, Klaviyo email flows, and a simple CMS for non-technical staff.
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Read post →Free 5-minute audit if you want to see what's broken first. Or jump straight into a project.