Why should I move to Hydrogen????

[Clodbuster]

Why should I move to Hydrogen?

What are the advantages and benefits to me. I've been using the same front for 6 years and firmly believe in keeping things simple stupid. Essentially quite happy with what I have.

I think it is a whole new platform so is it simple to migrate my existing content across?

[BenjaminL]

TL;DR:

Pros:

• Performant (great for SEO)
• Highly customizable
• No real migration is needed

Cons:

• Not mature yet, a lot of breaking changes throughout the development
• Not simple at all compared to theming (or some other headless solutions)

Well, I think it strongly depends on where you are coming from.

Is your front a Shopify theme or is it already a headless storefront?

Migrating content is quite easy because you basically need to change nothing. Just some additional config to ensure your Storefront app can access everything you need, and maybe some more meta fields or meta-objects to make your app configurable.

For existing shops, I don't think that you need to migrate to it unless there is a demand on migrating to a Headless (high control of the UI, high performance, ...). When integrating it there is a lot to think about, that Shopify does by itself, that you'll need to redo yourself.

In addition, Hydrogen is clearly not mature enough. Since its release, we already released a Hydrogen storefront, and the global feedback is that it's still a hell of complicated for nothing. Plus, the breaking changes every 3 months as Shopify knows how to do can be really annoying.

Since its last version thing has been more stable but I'll give it 6 months to a year before thinking of migrating to something that has been stable for the past 6 years.

Hydrogen is still a really great tech that is a game-changer in the Shopify ecosystem. 

We used it in the first place just to test the framework. And I think we'll wait a bit more before going back to it.

So if you think thing should be simple and stupid, maybe you shouldn't migrate to Hydrogen yet.

But it's still a great exercise for new shops. And it's great to keep up the Shopify stack, in order not to need a lot of learning when Hydrogen will be a enough mature solution

[Clodbuster]

Thanx very much for a very candid and concise reply. I am happy with what I have right now but I'll keep my options open for when it becomes stable.