Thoughts.

The first thing I do on a Plus migration is lock the freight rules. 99% of cart abandonment after replatforming traces back to surprise shipping math, not the actual product.

If your product page LCP is over 2.5s on a real Pixel device, your hero image is doing 80% of the damage. Compress and convert to AVIF before you optimize anything else.

Replatforming cost is rarely the platform fee. It's the integrations you forgot: ERP, OMS, 3PL, tax engine, subscription billing, returns. Map those before you scope the storefront.

Most "Shopify can't do this" claims I hear are actually "the previous agency wired it through Liquid when it should have been a Function." Re-architect the data flow first; rewriting a theme is the cheap part.

The cleanest signal that a Plus build is on track: a junior on your team can ship a copy change to production without paging an engineer. If that workflow doesn't exist yet, that's the actual scope of the project.

Founder-led consulting math: my hourly is 4x a senior engineer at a 50-person agency, but the project ships in 1/3 the timeline because there are no handoffs, no Slack triage, no sync meetings. Total cost lands lower. That's the trade.

If you're running headless, your first question should not be "Hydrogen or Next?" It should be "is our content team okay losing the WYSIWYG, or do we need to keep the storefront editable in admin?" Answer that and the stack picks itself.