Hosting a storefront is not tied to our platform. While we make it easy to showcase connected storefront apps in your store, you may choose a hosting provider to make them accessible to your customers.

Our starter kits (Origin, Horizon) are compatible with many leading hosting providers and offer the flexibility to choose the platform best suited for your needs.

While these guides will work for hosting any custom storefront app you might develop, we will be using our Swell themes within the examples.

The first step in setting up your storefront host will be packaging up your storefront theme. From there, you'll be able to deploy it to your desired hosting platform, but we'll get to that later.

It is important to note that we periodically update our Swell themes' features and performance.

To host your Swell storefront theme elsewhere, we'll first need to get you set up with a public repository and clone the theme. We recommend using GitHub for this—as it is compatible with all the hosting platforms we will be looking at later on.

You can use alternatives like GitLab, but you may need to confirm its compatibility with the hosting platform of your choice before setting up your repository.

Below is a list of our storefront starter kit repositories, so the choice is yours. For an overview of each of the themes, you can find additional information about them there.

Once you've decided on a starter kit, let's clone the project to a new private GitHub repository. Navigate to the storefront repository of your choice and clone it through your preferred method. Refer to GitHub's repository cloning guide for more information.

Git cloning methods
GitHub CLI: gh repo clone swellstores/origin-theme

HTTPS: git clone https://github.com/swellstores/origin-theme.git

Once cloned successfully, you should see all the storefront files in your newly created private local repository. Follow the start kit’s instructions on how to set it up for local development:

Additionally, each starter kit has instructions on which environment variables and commands can be used to setup deployment in your chosen hosting platform. We can now use this repository to deploy our storefront in any of the hosting services listed below.

Check below for additional information on hosting services or specifically hosting a Swell storefront theme on one of the services.

Like Netlify and Vercel, Cloudflare Pages is another JAMstack oriented deployment platform with room for advanced collaboration on projects through unlimited seats.

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A seasoned veteran in the cloud hosting space, Heroku is renowned for its ease of use, scalability, and flexibility in building web apps.

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Offering hosting and serverless backend services, Netlify specializes in automating the deployment of static websites—including Swell storefronts.

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Built and designed with the developer experience (DX) and performance in mind, Vercel is a serverless backend hosting platform for web applications perfect for hosting Swell storefronts.

Learn more