Building Reusable Shopify Components: Why I Started DD-Components
When I first started working with Shopify, I ran into the same problem over and over: every project needed a banner, a slider, a countdown timer, or some little interactive element that didn’t come baked into the free themes.
What’s Wrong With One-Off Builds
Sometimes I’d grab a third-party library like Slick or Swiper. Other times I’d build something custom for a client. But either way, the pattern repeated: I was solving the same problem in slightly different ways, reinventing the wheel every time. It worked in the short term, but it wasn’t scalable. Clients were paying for me to rebuild the same feature, and I was eating time I could’ve used to push projects further.
That’s when the idea for DD-Components clicked: build once, reuse everywhere.
What’s Wrong With One-Off Builds
The biggest issue with doing everything from scratch is consistency. If I tweak a slider in Project A, I have no clean way to bring those improvements into Project B.
On top of that, most themes either ship with bloated features nobody really uses, or they’re missing the practical features store owners ask for all the time. Free themes get you started, but they don’t give you urgency tools like countdown timers or polished announcement sliders.
The result: developers spend hours repeating code, store owners struggle to customize, and performance sometimes takes a hit because we lean on heavy external libraries.
The DD-Components Approach
Instead of patchwork solutions, I wanted a library of lightweight, admin-friendly, and reusable components.
- Drop-in design: Components that can slot into a Shopify theme without pulling in a bloated framework.
- Admin control: Every component comes with schema settings, so store owners can toggle options, adjust text, or pick styles in the Shopify customizer.
- Developer focus: I build with BEM naming, modular SCSS, and vanilla JavaScript. That means performance is top of mind, and other developers can understand the code quickly.
The goal isn’t to compete with full theme frameworks; it’s to fill the gaps with tools that work well in any theme.
First Components (and Why I Built Them)
I started with two essentials:
- Countdown Timer: urgency drives conversions, and almost every client asks for it. Building it once as a reusable block saves me from hacking it together each time.
- Announcement Banner Slider: instead of leaning on heavy libraries, I built a slider that’s simple, responsive, and customizable. Perfect for rotating sales messages or site-wide announcements.
Up next are features like a Shipping Threshold Progress Bar, a Marquee Slider, and Infinite Scroll for collections. Each one solves a common e-commerce problem I’ve hit more than once.
The Philosophy
At the heart of DD-Components is a simple belief: small, focused tools beat big, bloated solutions.
A countdown timer doesn’t need to be wrapped in a 50kb plugin. A slider doesn’t need to pull in jQuery. Each component should be:
- Simple
- Accessible
- Performant
- Reusable across contexts
That’s what I’m building toward.
What’s Next
DD-Components isn’t finished, it’s a growing library. Right now I’m releasing the first two components, and I’ll keep adding more over the coming months.
If you’re a store owner, these tools mean you don’t need a custom theme overhaul to get the features you want.
If you’re a developer, it means less time reinventing the wheel and more time focusing on the parts of the project that make it unique.
Check out the live demo site here:
Want to follow the journey? Subscribe to this blog or connect with me on LinkedIn and Bluesky for progress updates, new component drops, and behind-the-scenes insights.
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