The look and feel of your Shopify store is critical to your brand, user experience and ultimately, your sales.
Not only that, but the theme you choose also impacts your admin experience, your site speed and ongoing costs to maintain and add front-end features as you grow.
The Shopify Theme Store offers a handful of themes developed by Shopify itself (that are simply variations of their core Dawn theme), and over 100 Premium options costing up to $400 USD, created by theme developer partners.
It can be overwhelming to decide what’s right for you – and you may be wondering “are paid Shopify themes worth it?”
What’s the difference between free and paid Shopify themes?
First off, always limit your choices to what’s available in Shopify’s official Theme Store. Every theme in the store has been vetted by Shopify to ensure it meets strict requirements for functionality, clean code, site performance, security and overall user experience (including mobile responsiveness).
Free Shopify themes
What many merchants don’t know is all of the Theme Store’s free themes are simply variations of Shopify’s core Dawn theme with a series of different configurations to give merchants a starting point to work from.
Free themes are great if you’re working to a budget or getting started on Shopify for the first time. However, if you’re growing your store or are a serious business, you’ll soon find you outgrow what they have to offer.
Premium Shopify themes
Premium themes, particularly from experienced theme developers like Clean Canvas, are all created for specific types of catalogs and selling requirements, and come with an increased level of versatility, features, sections, settings as well as more professional high end design.
Because themes are the developer’s business, they also receive serious reinvestment, enhancement and general maintenance to ensure that they’re at the cutting edge of merchant store needs. Tip: check the Release notes on a theme’s listing page to see how invested a developer is in their theme.
Another major separator is the expert support you can expect from long tenured theme developers such as Clean Canvas. This is not something that you could expect with a free theme.
Reliable and responsive support is what truly sets the best theme providers apart – it’s the most important factor when investing in a premium theme. Not all theme developers provide the same degree of support, so it is important to check theme reviews to see what other merchants have to say about their support experiences.
Shopify Theme Store vs third-party marketplaces
Shopify does not allow approved themes to be sold outside the Theme Store, meaning themes you find on third-party marketplaces like ThemeForest carry risk. Their developers either didn’t want to go through the rigor of meeting Shopify’s standards or were rejected from the Theme Store.
Besides bugs, there are 3 additional downsides for themes purchased outside of the Theme Store:
1) You can’t test drive the theme in your staging environment before purchase or pushing live to customers. Testing is critical to ensure the theme meets your needs, works with your third party apps and is easy to use, and allows you to compare a few themes before committing.
2) They may not be compatible with the apps and other integrations you want to make.
3) If you experience any problems with your theme, Shopify support will not help you (and your theme developer may not offer support, either). The costs to remedy your issues include lost sales, developer time and people hours to re-theme your site.
Are there disadvantages to free Shopify themes?
As all free themes are variants of Shopify’s core Dawn theme, they will be compatible with Online Store 2.0 and, because they are built and configured internally by Shopify, are safe to use for any store. However, you will have to rely a lot on the guides provided by Shopify for theme support.
But free themes are more streamlined in terms of features and functionality compared to Premium themes. This means you’ll need to either:
1) Live without these features.
2) Find apps to fill the gaps.
3) Use developers to build them into your free theme.
Despite the savings of a few hundred dollars up front, you can easily spend much more on monthly app fees (which scale with your users and sales) or vastly more if using custom development.
For example, something as simple as a rotating promo bar can cost you $15 per month, or $180 per year (every year) for an app while also adding additional scripts that weigh down site performance. Multiply this by the number of features you need to solve for with apps, and the costs really add up.
On the flipside, Shopify Partners can charge anywhere from $30 to $300 per hour to build features that come out of the box with Premium themes. Very often it is best to get this natively within a premium theme, as when an update is available that customisation may become redundant. Leveraging a premium theme with the features already built in ensures continual support of that functionality.
Today’s shoestring budget can really tie your cash up later. If you are serious about growing your online business long-term, a Premium theme is definitely worth it.
What are the benefits of Premium Shopify themes?
More built-in features
Free themes will give you core features like mega menus, cross-sells, product reviews and collection filtering, but are missing valuable features that enable rich merchandising, improve conversion rates and help build bigger order values.
For example, Clean Canvas’s ENTERPRISE and CANOPY themes include enhancements like:
- Mega menus to support fast navigation and scale to mobile devices seamlessly.
- Promo banner slots you can include in mega menus and collection pages.
- Animated announcements and scrolling banners.
- Media and promo grid sections that let you display custom banners across desktop and mobile.
- Search prompts to highlight your store’s offering.
- Speech search to enable customers to search your store by voice.
- Product badges to highlight product features in collection listings.
- Trust badges to show off your shop’s reputation.
- Quick view to help customers see product info and add to cart without leaving collection pages.
- Infinite scroll for quick browsing.
- Recently viewed carousels to support returning visitor journeys.
- Breadcrumbs for better navigational usability and SEO.
- Product tabs for customized description sections.
- Stock counters to add visibility and urgency for customers.
- Flash messages to create urgency around products and sale events.
- Preorders and back in stock notifiers.
- Product hotspots for “shop the look,” product tours and shoppable user-generated content.
- Sticky cart buttons to keep them visible as mobile users scroll through long content.
- Sliding cart drawer to include cross-sells, promotional messaging, trust badges and more.
- Click to copy code buttons to remove friction for coupon offers.
- Popups to get more attention to email sign ups and promotional messages.
All these add-ons would cost thousands of dollars for apps or developers to build into a free theme.
Premium themes also come with more display options for your sections to put you in control of your experience without coding skills.
Faster time-to-experience
Because Premium themes come with more functionality out of the box, you can get customizing and serving customers in unique and helpful ways faster.
Value for the money
Premium theme developers invest thousands of hours into their theme build, not only from initial release but to keep it continually updated and supported. The value you get from the head start paid themes provide is incalculable. You get all future updates and enhancements as part of your single one off payment!
Flexibility
Premium theme developers are thoughtful about the features they build into their products, as too many features can also be a downside for merchants that don’t really need them.
For this reason, you’ll find some themes are described as best for larger catalogs, certain industries like apparel or electronics, or other business criteria.
The good news is you can always add functionality through apps or developers. No matter how sophisticated or complex you want to get with your store, starting with a Premium theme and applying your customizations to it is always more time and cost-effective than building a custom coded theme from scratch.
Are Premium Shopify themes a one-time purchase?
Yes! You get continuous updates, enhancements, and technical support over the lifetime of your theme for one flat price.
What are the best Premium Shopify themes?
This is the tricky part – there are many great Premium themes to choose from, and there’s no single “best” theme for all merchants.
It’s important to choose the best theme for your business, considering the features you need, the type of products you sell and the general aesthetics you’re after.
Look for themes with strong user reviews and frequently updated documentation logs (under the Release Notes tab in the theme listing).
It’s also important to purchase a theme from an experienced theme developer that builds its products with visual and technical best practices, and offers exceptional support.
Over the lifetime of your theme, and as you build new capabilities and integrate with apps, you may naturally encounter areas of conflicting code, browser and device type incompatibilities and other head-scratchers. Responsive and knowledgeable support really comes through when it counts!
Why trust Premium Shopify themes from Clean Canvas
As one of the first and longest standing and most successful Theme Store partners supporting over 100,000 Shopify merchants, Clean Canvas are unrivaled experts on Shopify themes, as well as the Shopify platform. Not only have they invested thousands of people-hours into perfecting theme development through constant interactions with a vast range of merchants and businesses, but a lot of the Clean Canvas team are also ex-Shopify. Unlike many new additions to the theme developers there, Clean Canvas are over a decade specializing in building themes specifically for the Shopify Theme Store.
Clean Canvas offer a portfolio of Premium Shopify Themes that are:
- Architected for fastest page load speed.
- Have clean, developer-friendly extensible code.
- Are battle-tested for UX and conversion across devices.
- Suit a wide range of business types and requirements.
- Come with top-tier white glove support.