How to Pick a Shopify Theme You Won't Regret
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How to Pick a Shopify Theme You Won't Regret
Every Shopify theme demo looks stunning. That's the point — theme developers are very good at using beautiful photography, curated content, and ideal settings to make their demos shine. The problem is that your store won't look like the demo, and the features you actually need might not be there at all.
I've helped hundreds of merchants choose Shopify themes — first during my time working at Shopify, and now through my consultancy ShopiCraft. Theme regret is one of the most common issues I deal with. A merchant buys a theme, spends weeks customising it, and then realises it can't do something fundamental they need. Switching themes after launch is painful, expensive, and almost always avoidable.
This is the process I walk my clients through. It's not complicated, but it does require thinking about your business before you start browsing.
Know What You Need Before You Start Looking
The single biggest mistake merchants make is browsing the Theme Store first and narrowing down later. That's like shopping for a house by scrolling Instagram interiors. It's entertaining, but it won't help you find a place with enough bedrooms.
Before you look at a single theme, answer these questions:
What type of products do you sell, and how many do you have? A store with 10 handmade products has completely different needs from one with 5,000 SKUs across dozens of collections. A large catalogue needs strong filtering, collection navigation, and a layout that handles lots of products without looking cluttered. A small catalogue might need more storytelling space on each product page.
How important is product imagery? If your products are visually driven — fashion, art, home décor, food — you'll want a theme that leads with big, high-quality images and gives you control over galleries and media. If you sell industrial supplies or technical products, detailed specs, comparison tables, and bulk ordering features matter more than a full-bleed hero image.
Do you need any specific features? Think about things like a mega menu, product variant swatches, a quick-add-to-cart button on collection pages, age verification, a store locator, product tabs, a size chart, countdown timers, or before-and-after sliders. Write them down. This becomes your requirements list, and it's the most important thing you'll bring to the Theme Store.
Are you selling internationally? If you're using Shopify Markets or selling in multiple currencies and languages, you'll want a theme that handles this cleanly — not all themes do.
Are you planning to run a blog? Some themes have very basic blog templates. Others have rich layouts with featured images, author bios, related posts, and proper typography for long-form content. If content marketing is part of your strategy, this matters.
Understanding the Theme Store
The Shopify Theme Store currently offers over 800 themes. Every theme in the store has passed Shopify's review process, which means it meets baseline standards for performance, accessibility, and code quality. That's good — but it doesn't mean every theme is right for your store.
Here's what you need to know about how the store works:
Free vs. paid themes. Shopify now offers over 20 free themes, including the Horizon collection — a set of 10 new themes launched in 2025 that represent a major leap forward in what free themes can do (more on Horizon below). These aren't "worse" than paid themes. In many cases they're genuinely excellent. But paid themes (typically $180–$400 as a one-time fee) generally offer more sections, more layout options, and more built-in features. Whether you need those extras depends entirely on your requirements list.
One theme, multiple presets. Most themes in the store show several different "styles" or "presets" — different colour schemes, layouts, and configurations of the same theme. Don't get distracted by this. The presets are just starting points. What matters is the underlying feature set, because that's what you can't easily change.
Demo stores are marketing. I keep saying this because it's important. The photos, copy, and branding in the demo have been professionally produced to make the theme look its best. Your store will look like your content, not the demo. Focus on structure and features, not surface appearance.
How to Actually Evaluate a Theme
Once you've got your requirements list, here's how to work through the Theme Store methodically.
Filter by your industry or catalogue size. The Theme Store lets you filter by things like catalogue size, product type, and layout style. Use these filters. With 1,000+ themes to choose from, they're essential for narrowing the field to a manageable shortlist.
Check every feature against your list. Each theme has a feature list on its Theme Store page. Go through it carefully. If your must-have features aren't listed, don't assume they're hidden somewhere — they probably aren't. Pay particular attention to navigation options (mega menus, sidebar filters, breadcrumbs), product page features (variant pickers, media galleries, tabs), and collection page layouts (grid options, quick-add, infinite scroll vs. pagination).
Try the demo on mobile. Pull out your phone and browse the demo store. Depending on your industry, 60-80% of your traffic is likely coming from mobile devices. Does the theme feel good on a small screen? Is the navigation intuitive? Can you easily browse products, read descriptions, and find the add-to-cart button without zooming or scrolling endlessly? A theme that looks gorgeous on desktop but clunky on mobile is a liability.
Read the reviews. The Theme Store includes merchant reviews. Same advice I give for apps — read the negative ones carefully. Are people complaining about poor support, bugs that don't get fixed, or features that don't work as advertised? A theme with 4.5 stars but consistent complaints about slow support responses is a red flag, because you will need support at some point.
Look at the developer. Who built this theme? How many themes do they have in the store? How active is their support and documentation? Some of the most reliable theme developers — like Archetype Themes, Maestrooo, Out of the Sandbox, and Clean Canvas — have established track records and detailed documentation. That matters when you run into an issue at 10pm on a Sunday night before a product launch.
Things That Seem Important but Aren't
Colour scheme and fonts. These are fully customisable in every Shopify theme. Don't choose or reject a theme based on the demo's colour palette. You'll change it anyway.
The demo's photography. Your photos won't look like the demo photos. The layout and structure matter. The pictures don't.
The number of presets. Whether a theme has 3 presets or 8, you're going to customise it to match your brand anyway. Presets are a starting point, nothing more.
Animations and visual effects. Parallax scrolling, fade-in animations, and hover effects look impressive in demos. In practice, they can slow your site down and annoy mobile users. Prioritise clean functionality over flashy transitions.
Things That Seem Minor but Really Aren't
Section and block flexibility. This is a bigger deal now than ever. Shopify's newer Horizon-based themes support up to eight levels of nested blocks, which gives you dramatically more control over page layouts without touching code. Older themes built on the previous Online Store 2.0 framework are more limited — typically only two levels of nesting. Whether you're looking at a Horizon theme or a third-party theme, check how many section types are included and how flexible the block system is. A theme with 30+ section types gives you far more room to customise than one with 12.
App compatibility. If you're planning to use specific apps (reviews, subscriptions, loyalty programmes), check whether the theme plays well with them. Some themes have built-in integrations with popular apps. Others require workarounds. The theme's documentation or support team should be able to confirm this.
Update history. Themes that are regularly updated stay compatible with Shopify's evolving platform. Themes that haven't been updated in months may break when Shopify rolls out new features. Check the theme's changelog if one is available.
Documentation quality. You're going to have questions. Good documentation — with screenshots, video tutorials, and clear setup guides — saves you hours. Before buying, visit the developer's help centre and see how thorough it is.
When a Free Theme Is the Right Call
Don't assume you need a paid theme. For many merchants, especially those just starting out, Shopify's free themes are the smart choice.
Horizon is Shopify's newest generation of free themes, and it's a genuine step change. Launched in 2025, the Horizon collection includes 10 different presets — each with a distinct visual style but sharing the same powerful foundation. That foundation includes up to eight levels of nested blocks (compared to two in older themes), AI-powered content tools that let you generate design blocks from text prompts, and features like mega menus and product variant displays that previously required a paid theme. If you're starting fresh today, the Horizon collection is the first place I'd look.
Dawn is also still a strong option. It's leaner and simpler than Horizon — fast, clean, well-documented, and has been the default Shopify theme for years. There's a huge amount of community knowledge and support around it, and if you want the most lightweight base to build on, it's hard to beat.
Beyond Horizon and Dawn, Shopify offers other free themes like Refresh, Craft, Sense, and Ride — each with a slightly different design direction but solid code quality and ongoing maintenance.
A paid theme makes sense when you have specific feature requirements that the free themes don't cover, or when your business is established enough that the investment in a more feature-rich theme will pay for itself through better conversion rates or reduced need for custom development.
The Bottom Line
Picking a theme isn't a design decision. It's a business decision. The right theme is the one that supports how your store actually needs to work — not the one with the prettiest demo.
Take 30 minutes to write your requirements list before you start browsing. Test on mobile. Check the speed. Read the reviews. And if you're unsure, a quick consultation with someone who knows themes inside and out can save you the cost of buying the wrong one and rebuilding weeks of work.
If you'd like a second opinion before committing, or you've already picked a theme and want to make sure it's the right fit, book a free intro call. I've evaluated hundreds of themes over the years and I'm always happy to point people in the right direction.
Daniel Perera is the founder of ShopiCraft, a boutique Shopify consultancy based in Ireland. He spent nearly 6 years at Shopify as a Product Launch Specialist and also worked at Google. ShopiCraft is a certified Shopify Partner specialising in consulting, store builds, custom app development, and theme customization.