What I do on a Shopify store
Shopify removes hosting, security and checkout from your list of worries, which leaves everything that touches the theme: how collections and products are templated, how filters and pagination behave, what the raw HTML sends to Google, how fast the page paints on a phone, and how the apps you installed have quietly stacked scripts on every page. That layer is where stores win or lose search traffic, and it is where I work.
- Theme development on Online Store 2.0: sections, blocks, metafields and metaobjects, without breaking the merchant’s ability to edit
- Technical SEO in Liquid: collection and product templates, canonicals, structured data, hreflang through Markets, filter and pagination handling
- Speed: app audit, script loading, image handling, theme JavaScript, measured in Core Web Vitals rather than a score
- Shopify Plus: checkout extensibility, B2B, Markets, Flow, and the customisations Plus stores actually need
- Migrations into Shopify from PrestaShop, Shopware, WooCommerce and Magento with the URL map written first
For agencies
The arrangement that already works: you own the client, the strategy and the report. I implement inside the theme, on your ticket, white-label. Sporting goods, fishing tackle, natural stone, composite decking, nail care and more have gone through this, and none of them know my name. Your account manager never has to explain who I am.
For store owners
Direct work skips the layer. You describe what is wrong - traffic flat, pages slow, a theme that fights every edit, a migration you are afraid of - and the person who answers is the person who will change the template. Everything runs in a duplicate theme first, so the live store is never the test environment.
If you are looking for a Shopify agency in Vienna or elsewhere in Austria and Germany, the practical difference is that you deal with the developer directly, in German or English, and the work is done by the person you spoke to.
Headless Shopify and Hydrogen: when it is worth it
Headless - Shopify as the commerce backend behind a storefront built in Next.js or Shopify’s own Hydrogen framework - is the right call for a small number of stores: content-heavy brands whose storefront is really a publication, B2B catalogs with logic Liquid cannot express, or merchants who need one backend behind several front ends. For most stores it is an expensive way to lose the theme editor, the app ecosystem and the checkout speed Shopify already gives you.
I build both sides - Next.js and React for a living, Liquid for two agencies - so the recommendation is not biased towards the one I can do. If headless is right, the storefront is built on the Storefront API with server rendering, the SEO signals Liquid gives you for free are rebuilt deliberately, and the migration keeps every ranking URL. If it is not, the Online Store 2.0 theme gets you ninety percent of the result for a fraction of the cost, and I will say so.
The rest of the cluster
Three of the recurring jobs have their own pages, because the questions are different.
- Shopify SEO: technical and structural search work in the theme, for agencies and stores
- Migration to Shopify: from PrestaShop, Shopware, WooCommerce or Magento, without losing orders or rankings
- Maintenance: theme updates, app audits, speed and a standing contact once the store is live
