Edge rendering for Shopify: when it’s worth the engineering

We built edge-rendered marketing pages for 4 brands. Here are the LCP wins and the gotchas.

Edge rendering for Shopify means running your storefront frames at Cloudflare or Vercel’s edge instead of regular hosting. We’ve deployed it for 4 brands. Here’s when it’s worth it.

The wins

TTFB drops from ~400ms to ~50ms globally. LCP improvements of 600 – 1100ms on average. Personalization with no client-side flicker.

The costs

Cache invalidation gets harder. Build complexity grows. Some apps (those that inject script tags during render) need rework.

Edge buys you a half-second. Make sure the half-second is the bottleneck before you spend the engineering.

When to do it

Brands above $20M ARR with international traffic and a frontend team. Below that, the engineering tax outweighs the gain.