In plain English
Think of a kitchen and a dining room. A headless setup keeps the kitchen (your products, posts and stock) exactly as it is, but lets you design the dining room any way you like, instead of being stuck with the one that came with the kitchen.
Used in a sentence
“We'll build it headless: Shopify keeps running your products and checkout, and the storefront is designed around your brand.”
“We liked Shopify for orders but hated the theme, so going headless let us keep one and lose the other.”
In detail
In a traditional setup, the system that stores your content also draws your pages, using its own templates. In a headless one, that system only stores and serves the content, through an API, and a separately built website asks for it and draws the pages. Headless Shopify, headless WordPress and headless CMSs all work this way.
The benefits are freedom of design, lighter pages and a site that isn't tied to one platform's limits. The trade-off is that it's a custom build, so it needs a team to build and look after it. For a business that has outgrown its theme but still relies on the platform behind it, it's often the best of both. See Shopify integration.
Why it matters for your business
Headless lets you keep a platform your team already knows while getting a site designed and built for your brand.
- Keep your store or CMS as it is
- Design without template limits
- Lighter pages that load quickly
Easy to mix up
Headless doesn't mean there's no website, or no editing screen. Your team still logs into the same system to change products or posts; only the pages customers see are built separately.
Related terms
CMS, API and Hosting. Or browse the whole glossary.
