Most Shopify stores still run on Liquid. That's true today, and it will stay true for a while. It's fast out of the box, cheap to run, and there's nothing extra to host.

Hydrogen is different. It's Shopify's own React framework, built for stores that need more control over the frontend than Liquid can give.

This post walks through both. No sales pitch, just the real trade-offs, some code, and an honest answer to the question people keep asking: when is it actually worth going headless?

What Liquid Gets Right (and Where It Runs Out)

Liquid is Shopify's own template language. Tobias Lütke, one of Shopify's founders, built it, and it's been running real stores since 2006. That's longer than most of us have been writing code for a living.