Every BigCommerce store starts with good intentions. You need a feature that doesn’t exist out of the box, so you build it. Then another. Then another. Before long, you have a store that works exactly how you want—until it doesn’t.
The problem with extensive customization isn’t the customization itself. It’s what happens when those customizations interact with platform updates, new apps, or changing business requirements. Each custom feature becomes a potential point of failure.
Recognizing the Warning Signs
The first sign is usually speed. Not site speed—decision speed. When a simple change like adding a new payment method requires weeks of testing because you’re not sure what it might break, you’ve crossed into liability territory.
The second sign is platform updates. BigCommerce releases Stencil updates, API changes, and checkout improvements regularly. If your team dreads these announcements because every update means regression testing custom JavaScript in Script Manager or hand-modified theme files, that’s a clear signal.
The third sign is documentation—or lack thereof. If the person who built your customizations is the only one who understands them, you have a single point of failure in your operations, not just your code.
Where BigCommerce Customizations Go Wrong
We often see the same patterns. Heavy checkout.js modifications that conflict with new payment providers. Stencil theme customizations that bypass the theme editor, making design updates impossible without developer involvement. Script Manager scripts that depend on specific DOM structures that change without warning.
The riskiest customizations are the ones that touch BigCommerce’s managed systems—checkout, cart, and customer authentication. These areas receive the most platform updates, and customizations here have the shortest shelf life.
The Maintainability Question
When we evaluate a store’s technical health, we ask: could a competent developer who’s never seen this codebase make changes safely within a week? If the answer is no, the customizations have become a liability.
This doesn’t mean you should avoid customization. It means every custom feature should be built with its eventual maintenance in mind. Will this be understandable in two years? Can it be tested independently? Does it fail gracefully?
Finding the Right Balance
The stores that scale successfully treat customization as a last resort, not a first response. They exhaust configuration options, evaluate existing apps, and only build custom when there’s no reasonable alternative.
When they do build custom, they build it like infrastructure—documented, tested, and designed to be maintained by someone other than the original developer.
The goal isn’t to avoid technical debt entirely. That’s impossible in a growing business. The goal is to take on debt intentionally, with a plan for paying it down, rather than accumulating it accidentally until it constrains your growth.