Should You Migrate to Shopify Hydrogen in 2025?

Well... it depends. I guess you weren't expecting that answer. Obviously there are a bunch of factors you must consider in order to make a technical decision to determine if Shopify Hydrogen is worth the resources/effort versus the potential ROI for your ecommerce store.

I'm going to highlight the pros and cons based on my experience working with Hydrogen in the last 3 years to help you make a better informed decision.

Firstly, Hydrogen is not for new stores looking to get started or have very small budget for development (unless you're a developer yourself) because you will need an experienced web developer to build it out, extend and maintain it, as the app ecosystem does not fully support Hydrogen storefronts.

It is ideal for scaling ecommerce businesses to large established ones that can afford to keep a developer or agency on the books because if you know anything about marketing, there will be constant website changes that by default cannot be done via drag and drop like in Shopify themes - unless you install an another app that opens up this functionality.

Let's talk about the con's first:

• You're at the mercy of Shopify if there are any bugs in their API or Hydrogen package and the support is fairly limited as currently it is a much smaller ecosystem compared to ecommerce platforms such as Woocommerce and Magento. The last breaking change was Hydrogen V1 to V2, which caused some frustration in the migration. You should expect breaking changes to happen whenever a new version comes out.
• Hydrogen alludes to fast load speeds / fast reactive sites, but this isn't necessarily true because the result depends on the developer working on it - if they are performance agnostic. Sure bare bones hydrogen is fast, and the example given by Shopify is BLAZINGLY fast, but it doesn't represent a real ecommerce store. Most ecommerce websites will have all sorts of scripts, iframes, images, videos being loaded to try gather data to make you buy their product. A lot of the pitfalls from React also come with it since it's built on Remix.
• Hydrogen is considered a custom react application so it's detached from the Shopify theme editor, therefore changes need to be done via the code. There are apps out there which will allow standard components to be built and provide a visual editor to design pages based on those components, but nevertheless you will need a developer to build those components. Additionally, you will need to create a good design system to align the branding and functionality whenever re-using components via visual editor.
• You can't develop on Hydrogen without a paid Shopify subscription. It is what is it. Also only one Hydrogen build per store.
• The default logs stored is up to 72 hours, so you will probably need to install a third party monitoring/logging service such as Sentry or New Relic.
• We are stuck to the recommended folder/file structure of Hydrogen.
• If you have some functionality that Shopify does not provide out of the box such as memberships, volume discounts, B2B, you will need to upgrade your plan or find a compatible app. Note: A lot of apps out there are not compatible with Hydrogen, especially those that inject html/scripts into the page. For example review apps such as Loox, Trust Pilot, Okenko will need the scripts loaded in the Hydrogen app and the html tags will need to be implemented manually, and you usually need to upgrade your app plan - somewhat feels like a scam.

If I haven't thrown you off from not choosing Hydrogen, then you must be committed.

Here's a list of pro's which make it worthwhile:

• Highly flexible/customisable for custom functionality since it’s literally a web app. Good for things for unique purchase flows that require more than just an add to cart button. Hydrogen allows provide the ability for dynamic and interactive pages.
• Control over the entire code base providing super powers to developers. Able to write unit tests, test react components and conduct end to end testing with Cypress / Playwright. Ability to hook up CI/CD pipelines via Github actions is also good.
• We can achieve BLAZING FAST speeds compared to standard Shopify themes by following best practices - something I will talk about in another blog post.
• Writing typescript feels safer than shopify liquid and plain JavaScript. I don’t like things breaking at runtime because we couldn’t catch it at compile time.
• Prevent apps from Shopify apps injecting all sorts of stuff into the HTML, since we now need to manually integrate them. It is more work, but at least we can control how things are being loaded.

That’s all the pros I can think of at the moment. It’s definitely a better developer experience than Shopify theme templates for those that are experienced with building react apps. No hate on Shopify theme templates as it is suitable for many smaller ecommerce stores.

The verdict…

Should you migrate to Shopify Hydrogen in 2025? The fact you are reading this blog post means you are probably in a position where the cookie cutter ecommerce functionality is no longer enough for you.

I would migrate if you need custom features that is not related to ecommerce such as a 3D interactive unicorn, you don’t mind vendor lock in, have access to developers to constantly update the website and have an expectation changes will take a tad longer.

Hit me up on socials if you feel I need to add/remove to this list.