Issue 245 - Celebrating Five Years of Liquid Weekly: The Trends That Stuck and The Ones That Didn't
Five years, as the archive tells it
Online Store 2.0 — first appeared in issue 2, August 24, 2021. The newsletter is almost exactly as old as sections everywhere. It came up 13 times, mostly in that first year, and the last mention was in 2024. That is not because it stopped mattering. It is because it stopped being news and became the floor. Theme app extensions — issue 5, September 14, 2021. Shopify announced the requirement for new apps on September 7, and it was in the newsletter seven days later. Script tags were on borrowed time from that moment, and it still took years for everyone to move. Hydrogen — issue 13, November 9, 2021. This is the arc I did not expect. Hydrogen shows up 19 times in five years, and 13 of those are in 2022 alone. Since then: two mentions in 2023, one in 2024, none in 2025, one so far in 2026. The headless future got a lot of airtime and then quietly became a specialty rather than a destination. If you sat that one out, the archive says you did not miss much. Shopify Functions — issue 44, June 28, 2022. And here is the opposite. Functions is the only topic in this newsletter that has appeared every single year since it launched: three mentions in 2022, then nine, nine, eight, and seven. No spike, no collapse, just a steady drumbeat for four years. On June 30 of this year, six weeks ago, Scripts were finally deprecated. Metaobjects — issue 72, February 14, 2023. Fourteen mentions in 2023, then a dip, then a second wave in 2025 as people worked out what they were actually for. Very few things in this archive get a second wave. AI — issue 71, February 7, 2023. Three mentions in 2023. Four in 2024. Seventeen in 2025. Eighteen in the first seven months of 2026. Nothing else in five years has moved like that, and it is not close. MCP — issue 177, April 8, 2025. The newest arrival, and already the thing that changes how a lot of you work day to day. Sixteen months from first mention to routine.
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The most-clicked links in five years
Ranked by the share of subscribers who clicked, not raw clicks, so a link from 2021 competes fairly with one from last year. 1. Creating a new Shopify 2.0 Theme Without Dawn — 16.7%, issue 11, October 2021 2. 5 things I have learned from Shopify's new theme Dawn — 15.2%, issue 15, November 2021 3. Add scheduling to your Shopify theme using Liquid — 14.2%, issue 16, November 2021 4. Building Better Liquid Arrays — 13.6%, issue 16, November 2021 5. How I Use ChatGPT for Shopify Tasks — 13.4%, issue 71, February 2023 6. GPT-4 built an embedded Shopify app UI in 30 minutes — 13.1%, issue 80, April 2023 7. Liquid Conditional Statements, Extended — 12.9%, issue 13, November 2021 8. Optimize Speed by Lazyloading Apps — 12.8%, issue 30, March 2022 Number three has no link because there is nowhere left to point. That tutorial pulled 14.2% of everyone who got issue 16, and today it loads a blank page — no redirect, no archive, no note. I checked a sample of twelve independent links from the first eighteen months and five of them are gone. If you have written something good, this is your reminder to keep it online. Somebody's bookmark depends on it. Two other things stand out. The top of this list is dominated by late 2021, when everyone was reverse-engineering Dawn at the same time and a good blog post could reach a meaningful share of an entire audience. And number five is the very first AI link I ever sent and it went straight into the all-time top five on its first appearance. The archive knew before I did.
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Conclusion
Here is what five years of archive actually says: you rebuilt your checkout customizations, you rebuilt your app's front end more than once, you migrated off script tags, you learned a new templating model, and a lot of you did it while the previous rewrite was still warm. If you have felt like you are running to stay in place, you were not imagining it. The record is right there. What you got for it is real, though. The discount logic that used to require Shopify Plus and the Script Editor now ships on every plan as a Function. The performance work that needed a consultant is now a default. The platform got broader, and you paid for it in rewrites. Thanks for reading — whether this is your first issue or you have been here since there were seventeen of us. Back to normal next week.
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