Why You Should Only Use Premium Shopify Themes
At Luna, our stance has always been that choosing the right Shopify theme is the most important decision of any project. That opinion has only grown stronger as we’ve worked on dozens of stores with different themes and seen just how much of a difference a theme makes in creating a store that meets the needs of the brand and converts well. Plus, a good theme saves us tens of hours of work, making every project more profitable.
Not every Shopify theme is of equal quality. We always suggest using a premium theme for projects. The $400 spent gives you tens of thousands of dollars worth of value. Let’s get into why we’re sooo into premium themes.
Why is Shopify theme selection important?
The theme is s the backbone of any Shopify website. It's what’s used when designing and building pages of the website and heavily contributes to visual look and user experience of using the store.
Visually, every theme has different layout options, sections which act as building blocks to add to the page, different features, and different settings to allow you to customize different elements. If you’re curious about the types of features different themes can offer, read How to Choose a Shopify Theme.
Functionally, a good theme will have several features optimized for conversion (making sales!). It will have the features that all the best ecommerce stores have, AND ways to customize it the way you like. Basically a great theme will have a ton of customization features that you’d otherwise need to pay a developer to create.
Hidden away, a good theme is also well maintained. It loads quickly, considers web accessibility, it’s consistently kept up to date, bugs are fixed, and it’s compatible with Shopify’s newest features.
Not one theme is a good fit for every project, it completely depends on the needs of the store. It’s really crucial to get the theme right before starting on the project, because once you’ve built the store, you would have to rebuild most of the website if you wanted to change themes. Taking the time to choose the right theme for you is going to set you up for the whole project and give you the design freedom you want.
What is a Premium Shopify theme?
While Shopify provides free themes in their store, they’re quite basic like anything that is free. The Shopify Theme Store also offers paid themes that cost around $400 for a lifetime license, and they’re developed by third-party agencies. Often agencies have several themes available in the theme store, each suited for a different type of merchant.
We consider a theme premium if it’s a paid theme sold in the Shopify Theme Store, and almost nowhere else. Here’s why we think going premium is best..
Theme Features
Premium themes have much better features than others. Think product page upsells, mega-menus, in-cart progress bar for free shipping, and a large selection of sections to design pages. These features look more premium, have better functionality, and in many cases the store’s conversion rate depends on them.
Theme Quality
Themes sold in the Shopify Theme Store have been vetted for their quality. They’ve passed strict quality standards and are guaranteed to be compatible with the latest Shopify features and up to date with best practices. The reason this isn’t possible for just anyone to do is because a new theme can take a full year for a team of people to design, develop, test and be approved into the Theme Store. After initial approval, a team must continuously maintain it with new features, bug fixes, speed, accessibility and SEO improvements, and making it compatible with new Shopify features.
Theme Demos
By purchasing from the Shopify theme store, you can demo the themes. You can actually try them out, set up all your pages and see how you like it before committing to a purchase. You can also see sample stores to see how other brands are using the theme, and read reviews that purchasers have made. Through using the demos, interacting with the sample stores, and trying your own demo, you can evaluate your own experience of using the theme.
Theme Maintenance
Themes need to be continuously updated and maintained in order to perform well. Updates can include adding new features, adding new sections, and improving upon existing elements. Additionally, themes need to be kept up to date to be compatible with new features that Shopify releases. For example, if Shopify releases Subscriptions then themes need to quickly incorporate feature into their product pages. Then there are invisible updates you don’t see, which are improvements to accessibility, performance (speed!), compatibility with browser updates and compatibility with new device types. There are a lot of quickly moving things that theme developers need to stay on top of.
Themes in the Shopify Theme store are regularly maintained to keep up to standard. Themes purchased elsewhere may never get updated.
Theme Updates & Longevity
Purchasing from the Shopify Theme Store means that updates are easily made available to you, and in many cases it’s possible to do a one-click update.
A theme purchase is an investment. The one-time fee gives a lifetime license to using that theme and its future enhancement updates. With the confidence of knowing that the theme is always being improved, merchants can use the same theme for years to come, maximizing the value they’ve gotten from that theme every time they make an update.
Developer Reputation & Support
We suggest only purchasing from teams that have a history of building and maintaining themes. Since we consider themes an investment, if a company sells it and never makes an update or is nowhere to be found to provide support, then the theme may not be useful in a few years. Purchase from developers that have a history of incrementally improving their themes.
Additionally, a theme purchase comes with support. Perhaps try emailing the support to see if the theme is a good fit, or read the theme reviews to hear how the support is.
Where to purchase a Premium Shopify theme?
If it wasn’t clear already, the best place to purchase a Shopify theme is on the Shopify Theme Store because of the reasons listed above. That's where you'll reputable and trusted theme developers.
We highly discourage purchasing full themes from places like Etsy and Themeforest. This is because there is not a way to confirm if these random themes meet the quality standards enforced by the Theme Store, how often they are maintained, what the support is like, and updates to new theme versions would be made difficult. It just doesn’t seem trustworthy to us, and if they were good enough to meet the standards of the Theme Store then they would be in it.
Why we don’t make themes
Our customers that love our pre-built Shopify sections often ask us if we’ll ever offer full themes. The answer is probably not. Here’s why:
A good theme takes a team of designers and developers to build, and then to regularly improve it and keep it up to date with Shopify’s new features and standards. This isn’t our expertise, nor do we have the resources for this. Our expertise is in working with store owners, and using those learnings to and educate Shopify web designers on best practices.
Every 6 months, Shopify releases an update. The last report had 150+ product updates. How could we ever keep up with making sure our theme was best serving merchants? We’d rather leave it to the experts in theme design and development who are equipped to make the best product. There are already so many great themes out there.
What we excel at is building on top of good themes. This means getting 90% of the way there with the right theme, and adding the last 10% of design and custom development to create the best solution for the store owner we’re working with. Our Shopify sections can add on to any theme to add more design flexibility, while you keep all the best functionality of your favourite theme.
For those interested in building more custom stores, using a good theme as a starting point to build on top of is by far the most time and cost effective approach you can take.
How often should you update a Shopify theme?
We say once a year, but it depends! The best way to start assessing if you should update your theme is to look at the theme’s changelog. The changelog will note all the updates that have been made in the theme in various versions.
When looking at the changelog, consider, do you need access to one of these new features? If they’re all aesthetic updates or bug fixes that haven’t affected you, then perhaps you can hold off on the update. But if Shopify has released a big new feature that a would require a theme update to be access them, then you should definitely consider updating.
Updating a theme with no code customizations should be relatively easy. In many cases, the content is moved over with just a click. Sometimes certain sections do need to be reconfigured in the settings, because they have been build differently in the new theme version. So some time should be allocated to revisions and testing.
Updating a theme with many code customizations can be quite time consuming as any custom code needs to be re-added to the store again. This means that a theme update can be both a time and financial investment if depending on developers to recreate custom elements.
Because of the time (and sometimes financial) investment of updating a theme, we don’t recommend keeping up with every theme version update. Instead, watch the changelog to see what updates become available, choose a quiet time of the year and work on it in the background before switching. Updating once a year means you’ll be keeping up with some essential updates that are made for a reason!
Concluding thoughts…
A theme sets the tone for the whole store because of its design and functional features. It determines what features will be available to your out of the box. Finding exactly what you need in a theme out of the box will save you hours of time and a lot of money spent on custom development, as well as hours spend bebugging custom elements. We’re all for custom development where it’s needed, but if you can avoid it by spending $400 on a custom theme, then do that because it will pay off infinitely.
Even though within the theme store the quality of the designs and the value provided in each theme varies, at least there has been some quality control and is an excellent place to start.
While choosing a theme is an important decision, a theme can only work with what it’s given. Prioritizing good product images, lifestyle imagery, and good copy will make the theme look even better and allow you to use all the features it offers.
Hana Drdla
