Building a lightning-fast headless store for Dart Flyscreens

Harnessing Shopify Hydrogen, Remix, and Sanity CMS to create a high-performance, fully customisable, multilingual e-commerce experience — achieving the infamous 95/100 Lighthouse score 🎉.

Dart Flyscreens, a leading name in motorcycle flyscreens and windshields, needed a faster, high-performance Shopify store to match the quality of their products, overcoming the limitations of their existing Shopify theme/Liquid setup.

Dart Flyscreens is UK-based manufacturer and market leader in motorcycle flyscreens

The Challenge

Like many Shopify stores built on Liquid, Dart Flyscreens struggled with slow loading times, leading to low scores in Google's Lighthouse and PageSpeed audits. Managing multiple regional stores also created a heavy workload for their web team, requiring them to handle duplicate content and product updates across different Shopify stores. Additionally, the traditional collection page architecture introduced extra clicks, causing customer drop-offs before checkout.

Dart Flyscreens Homepage - with bespoke 'bike selector' to find products quickly

The Solution

Together, we took a bold step by leveraging Shopify Hydrogen to create a high-performance, fully customisable, and multilingual Shopify store, utilising the latest technology to deliver a faster and more seamless shopping experience.

Product page with colour swatches variant selector

The shift to Shopify Hydrogen focused on enhancing site performance, customisation, and global accessibility. The solution included:

1. Ingretation of a headless CMS - Sanity CMS

• Sanity CMS provided a flexible, easy-to-manage content system beyond Shopify's standard admin/CMS.
• This empowered the marketing team with efficient content management capabilities.

2. Robust Multilingual Support

• Implemented comprehensive language translation features for English, French, German, Spanish and Italian, which is scalable for additional languages.
• Boosted international customer engagement and accessibility.

One store to rule them all - now optimised for multi-currency/languages

3. Revamped site architecture

• Removed collection pages from site architecture for a more dynamic, user-centric experience.
• By-passed the cart page with a 'buy now' buttons, sending users straight to the one-page checkout.
• Enhanced product showcasing and interactivity.

Bespoke site architecture included custom navigation menu

4. Optimised Speed and Web Performance

• Utilised Hydrogen’s server-side rendering for quicker load times.
• Increase from 39 to 95 in Desktop Lighthouse Performance score. An achievement rarely possible with standard Liquid stores!
• Increase from 42 to 75 in Mobile Lighthouse Performance score.
• Mobile loading time decreased from 8.3 seconds to 2.9 seconds, beating 70% of other websites' loading time.

Re-platforming to Shopify Hydrogen resulted in a lightening-fast loading time

The Results

Since launching, Dart Flyscreens has seen a 5% increase in conversion rate, an increase in Average Order Value, and an improved Lighthouse scores from Bad to Excellent.

Dart Flyscreens upgrade to a Shopify Hydrogen store marked a pivotal evolution in their e-commerce strategy. This transition, focused on speed, customisation, and multilingual capabilities, not only uplifted the user experience but also widened their international market reach. Dart Flyscreens' story is a clear example of how advanced e-commerce platforms like Shopify Hydrogen can meet the growing demands of the global online retail industry.