How Shopify Reduced Storefront Response Times with a Rewrite – Shopify Engineering

In January 2019, we set out to rewrite the critical software that powers all online storefronts on Shopify’s platform to offer the fastest online shopping experience possible, entirely from scratch and without downtime.The Storefront Renderer is a server-side application that loads a Shopify merchant's storefront Liquid theme, along with the data required to serve the request (for example product data, collection data, inventory information, and images), and returns the HTML response back to your browser. Shaving milliseconds off response time leads to big results for merchants on the platform as buyers increasingly expect pages to load quickly, and failing to deliver on performance can hinder sales, not to mention other important signals like SEO.