Headless Shopify & Shopify Plus

Absolutely – existing Shopify stores that are not currently headless can transition to a headless architecture at any time.

In truth, there are only a couple of small tweaks that need to be made from your Shopify backend in order to "activate" things and get it ready for a headless build-out. These are related to apps, namely enabling the Headless app, and/or creating a Custom App and configuring its scopes in order to implement the desired headless implementation.

The headless build can get underway while your existing Shopify store continues to operate as usual.

Is there any downtime while deploying Headless, when we have an existing Shopify build?

Not really, no – nothing out of the ordinary for a site move in general. Some DNS changes will be required, which might result in a short period of downtime while things propagate. In most cases, propagation can be accelerated by lowering the domain's TTL value ahead-of-time, and in our experience often completes within minutes rather than hours. When going headless, an official "go-live" period will need to be coordinated so as things are deployed during a period of lower-traffic (off peak hours) to ensure ample opportunity for testing after initial (re-)launch.

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