Best Shopify Themes for Blogging in 2024 (and Must-Have Features)
Blogs can be a great tool to improve a website's SEO. Beyond that, it can provide value to customers by providing educational information that helps inform their purchases (such as research about quality ingredients), demonstrate ways to use your products (such as with recipes using your products), or share news (such as press features to build credibility). For whatever reason you're starting a blog, it's sure to help drive traffic to the store and create a sense of community.
Before you start investing time into creating blog content, you'll want to make sure you're choosing a theme with a great blog layout. A good blog layout looks nice, is easy for users to filter through posts, and keeps users on the website longer by suggesting them related products and articles.
Don't ignore the importance of choosing the right theme. 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.
You can also customize your theme to create your dream blog. See how we used metafields to customize our blog post content:
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.
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 Features:
View the Align Shopify theme here.
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:
Article Features:
View the Broadcast Shopify theme here.
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:
Article Features
View the Expanse Shopify theme here.
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:
Article Features
View the Warehouse Shopify theme here.
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:
Article Features
View Story Shopify theme here.
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:
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:
Article template:
If you want your blog posts to be shoppable where customers can easily see featured products and collections, you'll want to check out our workshop on creating shoppable blog posts on Shopify. This is a great way to add value to your blog and encourage readers to shop!