Your storefront, from the edge.
LayerKick serves your existing Shopify theme from Cloudflare's edge, about 63 milliseconds to first byte, without a rebuild. This journal is me writing down how it's built.
Most Shopify stores I look at have the same problem. The theme is fine, the products are good, and then there are twenty apps layered on top, each adding script weight, and the whole thing renders on Shopify’s servers on every request. And the tools that promise to fix it, the client-side A/B testers and script optimizers, mostly work by adding more JavaScript on top. Coming from my background as a full stack developer, that always struck me as backwards.
LayerKick is my attempt at a different approach. We compile and cache your existing theme, put the rendered pages on the edge near the shopper’s own city, and serve from there. Cart, checkout, and everything transactional passes straight through to Shopify, untouched.
What that means in numbers
A warm page from LayerKick shows up in about 63 milliseconds. That’s measured on production traffic, not a lab benchmark (1,000 page visits to date). A stock Shopify storefront usually lands somewhere between 300 and 800ms before the first byte even arrives. The industry rule of thumb says every 100ms of load time costs roughly 1% of conversion, and honestly, that math is most of the reason this company exists. Our calculator will run it against your own numbers if you’re curious.
What we don’t touch
Your theme stays your theme, and your checkout stays Shopify’s checkout. There’s no migration, no headless rebuild, no six-month agency project. LayerKick sits in front, and if it ever misbehaves, traffic passes through to Shopify like we were never there. That was the failure mode I wanted before anything else: your store, exactly as it was.
Why a blog
I’m building LayerKick alone, and the engineering has been running way ahead of the marketing. The bar I keep coming back to is that we’re performance oriented, but we still want to be an elegant solution. So this journal is me writing it down as it ships. The transpiler, the cache, the A/B engine, the agent factory that writes most of the code. Real dates and real numbers, including the ones that needed correcting later.
LayerKick layers onto your existing Shopify theme and serves it from Cloudflare's edge. If anything goes wrong, traffic passes through to Shopify like we were never there. The fastest way to understand it is to watch it run on your own storefront, and the waitlist is the way in.