Themes

A theme is a template that determines the way that your online store looks and feels. On Shopify, you can switch between themes without affecting your store’s data and content. As you plan your Shopify Plus build, you can choose between customizing a ready-made theme or building your own custom theme.

Theme store

Browse Shopify Themes to find a theme that’s vetted and approved by Shopify. When choosing a ready-made theme, pay attention that the features meet as many of your requirements as possible:

• How does the navigation work?
• How is the product page laid out?
• Does it offer infinite scroll?
• Can I add color swatches?

Every theme on the store has a list of features, a live demo, and can be previewed on your store for free. Once you buy a theme, you can customize it according to your brand, and in most cases, add additional features by using apps or editing your theme code.

When reviewing themes, we always suggest that you not only review the theme demo setup by the developer, but also to take advantage of our Try a Theme functionality. You’ll be able to install the theme and access the theme editor to test its features, but you will not be able to publish the theme or edit the code until you’ve purchased the theme.

Here are some helpful resources:

• Adding, previewing and buying themes
• Choosing themes
• Customizing themes
• Liquid (Shopify template language) reference

Please note: if you have more than one store, you’ll need to purchase the theme for each store.

Custom-built Themes

Some merchants can’t find ready-made themes that meet their requirements, so they choose to build a brand-new theme that fully matches the appearance and the functionalities they’re looking for. This option is likely to cost more. It can also take longer than personalizing a 3 Store Design on Shopify Plus ready-made theme, as it requires significant investments in time and resources devoted to design, approvals, development, testing, and implementation. If you choose to develop your own theme, you will find documentation here.

 

Theme Development Best Practices

Developing and deploying a custom Shopify theme can, in its simplest form, be accomplished by creating the theme on your local machine and then uploading the theme files (as a ZIP) to a Shopify store. This is a very manual process and not a scalable solution when making frequent changes, or when the theme is being developed by a team of people.

To better support frequent changes by one or more developers, there are a number of available options for automating the theme deployment process.

For individuals or teams working on developing a Shopify theme that’s managed in a version control tool like GitHub, Shopify’s GitHub integration is recommended (there are also third party apps available, like Beanstalk or DeployBot). Using this type of tool allows teams to all contribute to the same codebase, scalably merge contributions together, complete an approval process before changes are deployed, and deploy specific versions of the theme (from specific git branches) to different Shopify stores.

Learn more about best practices for developing Shopify themes on our Partners Blog.