If your store's blog is an important part of offering value to your customers, building a community, or driving traffic to the store, then you'll want to make sure you're choosing a theme with a great blog layout. Don't ignore this part as you're bound to be disappointed later on to find out that improvements to your theme and blog will be costly. Design flexibility and increased conversions start with knowing your needs and choosing the appropriate theme to meet those.
Which theme you choose is the most important part of starting a project as it's going to give you the features you want, save you time and save you money. If you're choosing a theme for your project or store, I recommend reading our post, How to Choose a Theme on Shopify.
I've saved you the time of going through 135+ themes on the theme store and listed the best Shopify themes for blogging here. I've divided the features into "Blog Features" (the page with all posts) and "Article Features" (the single post page). To find the blog page when viewing the theme demos, look for "Blog", "News" or "Journal" in the main navigation or footer navigation. It's also worth viewing the different demo styles as they may show different blog layouts. Let's dive into what I found.
Theme: Align
A brand new theme in the Theme Store (May 2023), Align has really impressed us and its blog features also go way beyond what we've seen in other themes! It has to be our absolute #1 favourite for blogging. It's the only theme I found that includes a search bar on the blog page. Other themes may allow you to search for articles in their general search tool, but this one is article-specific. The only thing I see it missing is a way to filter by tag, although they do allow for organizing by category on the page.
The article template also has a way to show tagged products, making each article shoppable (shoppers can add to cart with one click from the article page!) and I love that this sidebar is sticky so the products stay with the reader the entire time. Another great feature on the article page is their formatting options. They show how to create callouts, lists, and even tables to make blog posts easy and beautiful to read. Overall, this is a great blog template for websites that are regularly updating their blog.
Blog Features:
- Article search bar
- Article categorization
- Unique article layout
Article Features:
- Large article header
- Shop Related Products: Any products tagged can easily be shopped from the sidebar.
- Content formatting options such as callouts, numbered lists, bullet lists, and tables.
- Social sharing: Easily share the article to different platforms
View the Align Shopify theme here.
Theme: Broadcast
This is one of our all-time favorite Shopify themes in general and the blog template is one of the best we've seen on Shopify. The blog is designed specifically for e-commerce, with an article sticky sidebar that has a selling feature that makes tagged products shoppable to the reader, and keeps them on the site longer by suggesting more articles to read. The only thing it's missing is a search bar for blog posts.
Blog Features:
- Featured post at the top
- Tag filters: Click on a tag to filter posts by category
Article Features:
- Small article header (gets straight to the point)
- Shop Related Products: Any products tagged can easily be shopped from the sidebar.
- Recent Articles: The sidebar shows more articles with their feature image.
- Author Bio: An image and short bio of the article author.
- Social sharing: Easily share the article to different platforms
View the Broadcast Shopify theme here.
Theme: Expanse
Expanse theme does a good job of making article tags prevalent and encourages readers to explore more with these tags. While the articles do have a "featured product" and "popular posts" section, it's not sticky. Personally, the sticky sidebar is essential to me, as you want the featured product to stay with the reader the entire time, and catch their attention.
Blog Features:
- Featured post at the top
- Tag filters: Click on a tag to filter posts by category
Article Features
- Recent Articles: The sidebar shows more articles with their feature image
- Shop Related Products: Any products tagged can easily be shopped from the sidebar.
- Social sharing: Easily share the article to different platforms
View the Expanse Shopify theme here.
Theme: Warehouse
Warehouse theme has a very basic design that could nicely be touched up with some CSS styling. What I like about it is the sidebar on the blog page that helps the customer get to know the brand if they're new to it, get to know the products, and even subscribe to the newsletter.
Blog Features:
- Featured post at the top
- Tag filters: Click on a tag to filter posts by category
- Sidebar with: Newsletter subscription, About us blurb, social links, featured products
Article Features
- Large header image
- Sidebar with newsletter signup and social sharing
View the Warehouse Shopify theme here.
Theme: Story
Story theme's design is quite basic, but it does include some additional features that most other themes don't. It has a featured blog post, blog tag filtering, and a sidebar on the article page to recommend further reading.
Blog Features:
- Featured post at the top
- Tag filters: Click on a tag to filter posts by category
Article Features
- Large header image
- Sidebar with blog categories and recommended articles
View Story Shopify theme here.
Worthy of Mention
There were some other themes that I came across that had beautiful blog pages but didn't make the cut. The reason is that while their blog templates were quite nice, their article templates were lacking. My minimum requirement for these was that they had tag filtering on the blog page. If blogging isn't a large part of your e-commerce website strategy but you do want a blog page that looks nice, consider some of these Shopify themes:
- Impact - Fun blog page layout with filtering and a newsletter subscription form
- Pursuit - Nice blog layout, and articles have an author bio section
- Retina - Interesting collapsible tabs on the article page for categories, recent articles and email subscription.
- Prestige - Clean blog layout with tag filtering
- Palo Alto - Clean blog layout with tag filtering
- Aurora - Nicely designed blog layout with tag filtering
- Marble - Clean blog layout with tag filtering
- Influence - Editoral style blog layout with tag filtering
- Stiletto - Blog layout with a focus on article excerpts with tag filtering
- Enterprise - Good for large catalogue brands that have a lot of articles
- Reformation - Every 4th article is presented as a featured article on the blog page
- Fashionopolism - Blog page has a sidebar that includes featured products, brand bio, and newsletter signup
- Yuva - Has a nice article layout with a card sidebar showing related posts.
- Vision - Nice blog page layout with a tech feel.
- Portland - Beautiful blog page layout but no tag filtering :( (this is the only one on the list without tag filtering, but it was so pretty that I had to include it)
Conclusions & Recommendations
Before starting to research this article, I thought that I would be able to find at least 10 good blogging themes, and unfortunately, there were only 2 out of 135+ themes that really impressed me. Many of the decent blog theme templates came from themes that were built for brands with large catalogs, many of these demos being either tech, furniture or outdoor gear brands, which I suppose makes sense for driving traffic to those sites.
Although Shopify themes focus on e-commerce features, there is a place for product promotions in blog articles as well. Blogs should not be an afterthought in Shopify themes as they can be huge traffic drivers for brands.
My recommendations to theme developers on what they should be including:
Blog template:
- Tag filtering
- Search bar
- Featured article
- Some sort of "About" the brand in case readers are arriving straight to the blog from a search
Article template:
- Sticky sidebar that includes recommended, shoppable products
- Further article recommendations to keep customers on the site longer (could be part of the above sidebar, but placed under the products)
- Social sharing
Let me know below in the comments if this article was helpful, or if you've noticed any other themes that have great blogging features.
Hana Drdla
