Every third Shopify store we audit has a page-builder app running under the hood. PageFly, Shogun, GemPages, EComposer. The pitch is always the same: drag-and-drop pages without a developer. The reality, almost every time: slower pages, locked-in design, higher monthly fees, and a store you can't fully edit after you cancel.
We stopped building on page-builder apps in 2023. Here's the honest reasoning, and what we do instead.
The three costs page builders don't put on their landing page
1. Mobile page speed, every time
Page builders load their own CSS, JavaScript, and sometimes an entire React runtime on top of Shopify's own theme. On an older phone over 4G, we routinely measure 2–4 seconds of extra load time versus a native theme section. Largest Contentful Paint on a page-builder PDP is almost always 1.5–2.5 seconds slower than the same content built natively.
Shopify's own buyer research puts a 10% conversion rate drop at every extra second on mobile. Page builders cost you buyers quietly, every day, forever.
2. Lock-in you don't notice until you cancel
When you build a product page in PageFly or Shogun, the HTML lives inside the app, not in your Shopify theme. The moment you stop paying, every page you built disappears from your storefront. Not a nag screen, not a graceful degradation. The page is gone.
We've had three client migrations in the past year where the switch from a page-builder app to native theme sections required rebuilding every product page from scratch, because the original content was locked inside the app.
3. Compounding monthly fees that scale with you
Most page builders are tiered: cheap at 10,000 visitors a month, meaningful at 100,000, serious at 1M. The fees grow exactly in the window where you have the least appetite to migrate off them. By the time you want out, you have 40 pages locked inside the app and a six-month rebuild ahead.
What we use instead
Shopify's own section-based theme system. We build with:
- Native Shopify sections: Liquid files that live in your theme and are fully editable through the theme customizer.
- Our own section library: hero, pricing, FAQ, PDP sections we've written, tested and reused across 100+ builds.
- JSON templates: Shopify's native way to let brands reorder sections, change images and edit text in the editor, with no app required.
The result: pages load as fast as the theme itself, the content stays yours forever, and the only monthly fee is your Shopify plan.
The one case where page builders make sense
If you're testing a brand-new store, selling fewer than 50 orders a month, and your team genuinely cannot touch Liquid, PageFly's free plan or GemPages is a reasonable training-wheels setup. The moment you cross $20k/month in revenue, migrate off. Every month after that threshold is a month of fees you'll never see back.
What a native section library looks like
Here's a snippet of what the editor view looks like on a store we built last month: a product page with 8 section blocks (hero, offer stack, benefits, accordions, reviews, cross-sell, sticky ATC, trust strip). Every block has editable text, images and settings. No app required, no monthly fee attached, and the entire page loads in under 1.2 seconds on a mid-range Android.
Each section is a Liquid file, roughly 150–400 lines. Not scary code; a competent Shopify developer can write one in a half day, and the brand gets the full edit flexibility of a page builder without the monthly fee or the lock-in.
Should you migrate off your current page builder?
Three questions to answer:
- Is your Largest Contentful Paint over 2.5 seconds on mobile? If yes, you're almost certainly losing enough conversion to the slowdown to pay for the migration inside 90 days.
- Is the app's monthly fee over $99? At that tier, migration pays for itself in under a year on fees alone.
- Are you planning a rebrand or redesign in the next 6 months? If yes, do the migration at the redesign. You're paying for the design work anyway.
If two of three are yes, migrate. If one is yes, plan the migration for your next design refresh. If none, keep what you have and focus on something higher-leverage.
Help with the migration
If you're on PageFly, Shogun, GemPages or EComposer and want to see what a native-section rebuild would look like for your store, tell us about your store and we'll send a free plan with a page-speed audit and the migration scope.