Headless architecture
Every page and all content on owned infrastructure. The commerce platform is reduced to a checkout endpoint — a payment arm, not a landlord.
A luxury convertible dog-carrier brand moved off a hosted storefront theme onto owned infrastructure. The commerce platform still takes the payment; it no longer owns the brand, the content, or the customer experience.
Every page and all content on owned infrastructure. The commerce platform is reduced to a checkout endpoint — a payment arm, not a landlord.
A community feature with moderated submissions, backed by its own database rather than a third-party embed.
Product pages restructured to a written brief, with legal pages, blog and email capture built into the site rather than bolted on as apps.
The migration happened before instrumentation was standard practice. Analytics from the previous hosted theme are not comparable to the current setup \u2014 different measurement, different definitions \u2014 and comparing them would produce a number that looks precise and means nothing.
We would rather show an empty measurement than a plausible one. A number nobody can check is worth less than an honest blank.
Variant IDs, a CDN rewrite rule and a checkout subdomain each look inconsequential and each will take the store offline if changed. They are now written down as an explicit do-not-touch list. Every engagement since carries the same artefact, because the knowledge that only lives in one person’s head is the knowledge that causes the outage.