Headless Shopify: Content versioning & rollbacks

Content versioning and the ability to initiate instant rollbacks are crucial for smooth product information management and content workflows. They also provide additional peace of mind and the ability to experiment safely, with the knowledge that an historic audit trail and rollback functionality is always available. This is especially the case for multi-person product & marketing teams!

Unfortunately, Shopify doesn’t currently provide these functionalities as part of their native offering.

Enter headless.

With a headless Shopify implementation, content versioning and rollbacks can become a natural part of your workflow, thanks to use of modern CI/CD pipelines and integration with a headless CMS.

Most CI/CD and modern cloud platforms feature instant rollbacks as part of their core offering, enabling headless builds the ability to immediately revert to a previous version of the website. Particularly for headless stores that use static site generation, the ability to roll-back deploys ensures fail-safe protection against mishaps and broken builds.

At Cocoon, we have a preference for leading cloud and continuous deployment pipelines such as Vercel, Netlify, and CircleCI. These tools have proven just as effective for our internal development & ops teams as they have for our clients.

For our team, they enable us to rapidly spin up multiple deployment pipelines, which allows us to prototype new builds and branches quickly and iteratively. From a client’s point of view, this is super helpful because it means that development can be conducted away from the production pipeline.

Rollbacks, autonomy & experimentation

For our clients, continuous integration tools allow for greater autonomy and experimentation through their versioning & rollback functionalities. One of our clients has a static-generated Shopify store, and they’re constantly testing out different layouts, call to actions, and designs. Because they have access to the continuous integration pipeline, they’re able to rollback changes at any time and revert to a previous — or newer — version of the build, in response to customer behavior based on split tests. 

We're the experts in Headless Shopify.

Your search for answers ends here. Discover our services.

Explore Headless Shopify Services

Similarly, because they have the autonomy to initiate rollbacks and force redeploys, our client has become far more independent and is able to successfully contain what would otherwise have become zero-day issues requiring immediate developer input. 

Zero downtime

With our preferred CI platforms, zero-downtime deployments and rollbacks are a given. All platforms in our arsenal (Vercel, Netlify, CircleCI, Digital Ocean and Railway) provide a stellar service in this regard. For our clients, this is a high value-add that allows them to ensure consistency and an always-on production environment. 

Content versioning

We love to augment our Headless Shopify builds with strong content management systems that are able to deliver on the marketing side. But for you, a critical component is the ability to control the content and flip between iterations.

Well, thanks to the awesome teams at leading headless CMS providers Sanity and Strapi (among our favorites), content versioning and rollbacks can become second nature for your headless shopify store. These content management systems, among others, store historical edits to content entities, enabling your marketing team to audit previous revisions, compare changes, and roll backwards and forwards in all but a few clicks.

For content-rich stores that heavily lean-in to on-site marketing and editorial, this is an operational game changer.

Strapi version 5 introduced revisions and content history as part of the core CMS, and is a tool we frequently couple with Shopify, within headless builds.

As for Sanity, it’s content history and collaboration tools will allow your e-commerce content team far greater flexibility over your storefront’s storytelling, safe in the knowledge that content can be compared and rolled back at any time. 

Code tracking, version history & source control

One thing Shopify doesn’t do is permit code access to your store, outside of its theme and any of your custom apps and pixels. With headless, this limitation completely goes away.

As a result, the storefront is essentially developed from the ground up with custom code, allowing your dev team to build a perfect implementation that satisfies every single business requirement.

The codebase will (most likely) be using Git version control; a source control system that stores the codebase in its current state... along with all previous iterations and changes that have been made over time. This is referred to as a code repository, and it’s where all of the frontend code, along with any middleware and micro applications powering your headless Shopify storefront will live.

Informal chat? Works for us. 🤘

Contact Cocoon for a no-cost, no-obligation consultation.

Let's talk Shopify

Code changes can be tracked, compared, and reverted, even down to the line, across the entire codebase for the headless storefront. Not only does this reduce friction and “black holes” within the development process, but provides a fail-safe approach to code management that ensures utter transparency, safety, and robust versioning.

Continuous integration platforms – such as those mentioned above – typically provide rollback functionalities of their own, but this doesn’t actually revert the code housed in the Git repository—it just reverts to a previous “build” of the code. But through the Git-tracked repository itself, any errors or issues that already made their way through can be tracked, identified, and corrected by your headless Shopify agency or development team.

While this is a task for your developers, if we educate you (as our client) on how to effectively manage the CI/CD pipeline, you’ll be able to rest in the knowledge that you have complete control over the active published build, able to revert and republish at any time. However, our builds don’t often fall foul of bugs in production — thanks to automated testing.