Shopify

Hydrogen

Definition

Shopify's storefront toolkit for custom frontends. A Hydrogen project is a React Router app with Shopify API clients, components, and a CLI. It is Shopify's recommended way to build a headless storefront.

Defined in Headless Shopify in 2026: Who Actually Needs Hydrogen.

Where Hydrogen comes up

The guides that put this term to work, rather than just defining it.

Related terms

Shopify B2B: Shopify's native features for selling to other businesses from the same admin you use for direct-to-consumer sales. B2B buyers are set up as companies with one or more locations, and each location can get its own catalogs (products and prices), payment terms, tax exemptions, checkout settings and contacts. Shopify offers it on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans.
Core Web Vitals: Google's three page-experience metrics. A good score is Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads, separately for mobile and desktop.
Shopify Flow: Shopify’s free ecommerce automation app that runs workflows — a trigger, optional conditions, and actions — inside your store and across connected apps.
Shopify Markets: Shopify’s built-in system for configuring how a single store sells to different countries or regions — currencies, domains, languages, catalogs, pricing, and duty settings — from one admin.
Oxygen: Shopify's edge hosting for Hydrogen. It runs a worker-based JavaScript runtime, ships with the Hydrogen sales channel, and is included at no extra charge on paid plans. You can self-host Hydrogen elsewhere, but Oxygen is the default path.
Checkout extensibility: Shopify's framework for customizing checkout using UI extensions and checkout functions instead of editing checkout.liquid directly. It lets merchants add or modify specific, sanctioned surfaces of checkout — banners, fields, upsells, delivery options — while Shopify continues to own and update the core checkout flow underneath.

All 164 terms

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