Ruggable's headless rebuild delivers 300% more organic clicks

Ruggable, a Shopify-based ecommerce brand, has improved its organic search performance by decoupling its frontend from its commerce backend and rebuilding on a modern stack. The company reports a 300% increase in unbranded search clicks, a 75% improvement in search rankings, and 40% faster site speed since the change.

The original architecture was a drag on both performance and developer productivity. The team dealt with slow page loads, low accessibility scores, and lengthy build and deployment cycles. Marketing was dependent on developers for every site change, and SEO rankings were deteriorating as a result.

The move was framed not as a platform swap but as an architectural fix. Shopify would continue to handle checkout, payments, and orders, while a new Next.js frontend deployed on Vercel would provide the performance and flexibility the team needed.

Three pillars of the new architecture

Ruggable launched the headless version of Ruggable.com in March 2023, built around three components:

Shopify as the commerce backbone

Shopify remains the foundation for all commerce-critical functions, chosen for its reliability, checkout experience, merchant tooling, and ecosystem. The headless move unlocked frontend freedom without giving up any of those strengths.

Next.js and Vercel for the frontend

The team standardized on React and Next.js, deployed on Vercel. This gave them full control over rendering, performance, and optimization while removing the constraints of a coupled theme layer. Vercel's preview deployments changed how the team reviewed and approved changes, allowing collaboration without requiring a local dev environment.

Contentful for content management

A unified content model in Contentful lets the marketing team manage copy and assets across languages and regions without developer involvement. Promotions, landing pages, and new market launches that previously took weeks now take hours.

What the performance gains came from

The improvements stem from several specific aspects of the new setup:

  • Content modeling with Contentful: All copy and images were modeled in Contentful, enabling support for multiple languages in various locales.
  • Unified tech stack: Internal, operations, and ecomm teams now all use React and Next.js for development, streamlining processes and improving efficiency. Shopify is reserved for checkout, payments, and order management.
  • Marketing empowerment: Promotions, landing pages, and launches now take hours instead of weeks thanks to Contentful's ease of use. Marketing can make site changes without developer resources, with confidence that changes won't break the site or take it down.
  • Developer productivity: Workflows for previewing and QAing new features without publishing an entire theme accelerated development cycles.
  • Reliability and scalability: The team achieved 100% uptime during peak seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with zero tech issues or downtime.
  • International expansion: The unified content model allowed the team to launch multiple domains in various countries with localized content and translations.

Next steps

Ruggable plans to continue optimizing initial page load performance by using SSG and next/font, measuring improvements with real customer data surfaced by Vercel Insights. The team also intends to implement customer data platforms to power AI-augmented personalization.

The company's results illustrate a modern commerce pattern: Shopify handling the transactions that power the business, with Vercel delivering the frontend experience that wins customers.