Sign up: Designing Enterprise UI Directly on Production Code

What are best AI tools? Take the State of AI survey

Builder.io
Builder.io
Contact sales

Sign up: Designing Enterprise UI Directly on Production Code

What are best AI tools? Take the State of AI survey

Builder.io
Builder.io
< Back to blog

Ecommerce

Headless ecommerce ROI calculator

January 18, 2021

Written By Steve Sewell

Calculate my possible ROI for going headless

What is headless ecommerce?

Headless ecommerce is a way to speed up your online store by using modern technology built for speed. Headless ecommerce essentially decouples what you see on your site from the backend logic and connects the site to data and services via APIs. The main benefits of headless architecture are: site speed, flexibility, and support for future use cases. Check out our full post for more info about what headless commerce is.

How are you calculating these numbers?

What we do is access your site's performance data by querying Google Page Speed Insights and finding how many long it takes for your page to load as measured by its the "first contentful paint," which we then compare to that of an optimized headless site.

Then, we apply stat that 1 tenth of a second in faster performance can boost conversions by 8% and assume you can get at least half of that (4% per 1/10 a second).

Finally, assuming you can conservatively get your site down to 2 seconds or less with an optimized headless build, we get the formula used to calculate the ROI above: (load time seconds - 2) * (80 / 2)

In cases where the value of the above ROI formula are greater than 50%, there is clearly major room for optimization, so we just consider at that point the conversion improvement can vary significantly, so we consider everything in that range to be "+50%."

What are my options for going headless?

There are many paths to you can choose in your migration to a headless site. Generally, we recommend you incrementally migrate over your pages, prove ROI lift and then focus on migrating your high-value pages first (i.e. PLP, PDP). While you migrate, it is crucial you continue to test the headless experience vs the legacy site and create content that can easily live on both experiences. Needless to say, you can do all of this with Builder.

For a free consultation on your options and possible ROI for going headless, contact us.

Visually editing a headless site in Builder.io

Share

Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook

Generate high quality code that uses your components & design tokens.

Try it nowGet a demo

Continue Reading
AI8 MIN
Subagents: When and How to Use Them
WRITTEN BY Alice Moore
February 3, 2026
AI9 MIN
Best LLMs for coding in 2026
WRITTEN BY Matt Abrams
January 28, 2026
AI8 MIN
Lovable Alternatives for 2026
WRITTEN BY Alice Moore
January 27, 2026

Product

Visual CMS

Theme Studio for Shopify

Sign up

Login

Featured Integrations

React

Angular

Next.js

Gatsby

Resources

User Guides

Developer Docs

Forum

Blog

Github

Get In Touch

Chat With Us

Twitter

Linkedin

Careers

© 2020 Builder.io, Inc.

Security

Privacy Policy

Terms of Service

Get the latest from Builder.io

By submitting, you agree to our Privacy Policy

  • Fusion

  • Publish

  • Product Updates

  • Design to Code

  • Headless CMS

    Multi-Brand CMS

  • Landing Pages

  • Web Apps

  • Prototypes

  • Marketing Sites

  • Headless Commerce

  • Documentation

  • Fusion Docs

  • Publish Docs

  • Figma AI to Production Code

  • AI Prototyping for Product Managers

  • Figma to Storybook

  • Figma to App Converter

  • Blog

  • Webinars

  • Guides

  • Case Studies

  • Community Forum

  • Partners

  • Affiliate Program

  • CMS Integrations

  • CMS Blueprints

  • Glossary

  • Figma to Code Guide

  • Headless CMS Guide

  • Headless Commerce Guide

  • Composable DXP Guide

  • About

  • News

  • Careers

  • Contact Sales

Security

Privacy Policy

SaaS Terms

Trust Center

Cookie Preferences

YouTube icon
Github icon
Blsky Icon
Twitter "X" icon
LinkedIn icon
Feed Icon