9 Best Shopify Themes for 2024: Free and Paid

Shopify is one of the world’s top ecommerce platforms. User-friendly, and inherently scalable, this platform gives businesses of all sizes (and industries), the tools they need to build a memorable brand, make sales (across various channels) and nurture customer relationships.

But if you want to get the best results from your Shopify store, you need to ensure you’re taking advantage of the right resources. That starts with choosing the best Shopify themes.

Shopify themes are the convenient templates that form the foundation of your store’s design, affecting not just how your website looks, but how it functions too.

Choosing the right theme is how you ensure you can effectively showcase your brand’s personality, differentiate yourself from the competition, draw attention to your products, and deliver an excellent customer experience.

So, with hundreds of free and premium themes to choose from (not to mention the option to create your own custom theme with developer support), how do you make the right choice?

Here’s your complete guide to choosing a Shopify theme that drives higher sales, improves customer loyalty, and elevates your brand equity.

Key Takeaways

• Shopify themes are the templates that allow you to showcase your brand identity and deliver exceptional customer experiences, without diving into code.
• There are numerous different types of Shopify themes available, including free and premium themes, custom themes, and themes designed for specific industries.
• Our three favorite free Shopify themes are Debut, Brooklyn, and Narrative.
• Our favorite premium Shopify themes are Flex, Empire, and Turbo
• When choosing a Shopify theme, it’s important to think about essential features, mobile responsiveness, loading speed, SEO, integrations with Shopify apps, and customization options.
• Once you choose a Shopify theme, you can customize it, either with the help of a developer, or by using Shopify’s straightforward theme editor.

Top Free Shopify Themes

Notably, free Shopify themes will always include fewer features than their premium counterparts, but there are still some excellent options out there. Here are my top choices for free Shopify themes in 2024, if you’re looking for a budget-friendly option.

Studio

Studio is by far one of the most popular free Shopify themes available. It’s sleek, stylish, and flexible enough to customize to suit your brand. With this theme, you can showcase high-resolution images (with rollover options), create lookbooks, and even showcase product videos.

It also includes options for FAQ pages, promotional banners, recommended products, and size charts. Plus, there’s a great mega menu option, making this theme ideal for anyone who wants to create a comprehensive website with lots of categories and sections.

Dawn

Dawn is another extremely popular free theme for Shopify. I love the minimalist style of this theme, which gives every page a highly professional appearance. Like most of Shopify’s free theme, Dawn includes support for all the features you need to run an effective store.

There are product review and recommended product options for marketing and conversion purposes, cross-selling solutions, and you can create your own FAQ page. Other features include high-resolution images, slideshows, lookbooks, image galleries, and enhanced search.

Craft

Craft is a Shopify theme I’d typically recommend for artists and creatives selling custom-made products. It’s very easy to set up and customize to suit your specific needs, and comes with plenty of basic features to help boost your sales, like cross-selling options and recommended products.

You also get some great merchandising features, such as the ability to show ingredients or nutritional information. You can even design image galleries, create a sticky header for your store, and showcase slideshows with high-resolution images.

Top Premium Shopify Themes

Premium themes on Shopify are typically more customizable, feature-rich and powerful. They range in price from around $150 to $350, depending on your needs. However, most options do allow you to test the theme for as long as you like without paying anything.

My favorite premium Shopify themes for 2024 include:

Impact

Price: $380

Impact is an extremely comprehensive premium theme, perfect for technology companies, home décor brands, and more.

The theme comes with three example pre-sets to choose from. Plus, there are more than 35 customizable sections, and you can access gradients, animations, and sticky add-to-cart buttons. This theme is fully optimized to boost conversion rates.

Alongside standard features like FAQ pages and product reviews, you can use EU translations, showcase press coverage and trust badges, and create before/after image sliders. You also get advanced product filtering and sorting capabilities.

Be Yours

Price: $320

Be Yours is a sleek and stylish theme, with four preset options, and more than 30 customizable sections. This is a theme that puts user experience first, with convenient features like a “recently viewed” section, infinite scroll, recommended products, and enhanced search.

It’s also a great theme for making your products stand out with animations, high-resolution images, color swatches, and lookbooks. Plus, you get access to features like an age verifier, countdown timer, custom contact forms, and stock counters.

Canopy

Price: $390

Inspired by the world’s biggest online marketplace (Amazon), Canopy is a fresh, clean theme, designed for large-scale selling. It’s specifically built to support large carts and inventories, with a prominent search bar, and an optional always-visible cart sidebar.

You can set up back-in-stock alerts, show recently viewed and recommended products, and create countdown timers.

Plus, there are tools for creating lookbooks, size charts, image galleries, color swatches, and more. You can even implement advanced collection page navigation options.

Alchemy

Price: $300

Modern and fast-loading, Alchemy is a great theme for companies looking to make their products the center of attention. This theme is brilliant for visual storytelling, with animation options, galleries, color swatches, product videos, and more.

You also get plenty of features intended to boost the user experience, such as “recently viewed” options, recommended products, mega menus, enhanced search, and press coverage sections. Plus, you can boost your chances of sales with promo tiles, banners, popups, and more.

Minimalista

Price: $380

I absolutely love the sleek minimalist appearance of the Minimalista theme. It’s brilliant for companies who want to create a professional and eye-catching aesthetic, with high-quality images, and animations. You get tools for boosting conversions, like a countdown timer, promo banners, popups, and product review sections.

Plus, you can provide your customers with tons of valuable information with before/after image sliders, lookbooks, shipping/delivery information, product videos, and slideshows. I particularly love how scalable this theme is, as it can easily accommodate high transaction volumes.

Copenhagen

Price: $320

Inspired by the stylish minimalism of Scandinavia, Copenhagen is a classy theme with five customizable presets to choose from. It comes with EU translations, countdown timers, age verifiers, and slide-out cart options. Plus, you get a range of tools for boosting conversions, like promo popups, recommended products, and before/after image sliders.

I particularly like the navigation features on this theme, which include everything from mega menus, to enhanced search, sticky headers, infinite scroll, and collection page navigation.

What Makes a Shopify Theme the Best?

Although I’ve selected a list of the best Shopify themes (free and premium) for this article, it’s worth noting that your own opinion of which theme is “best” will depend on numerous factors. Part of your choice will depend on your personal preferences when it comes to aesthetics.

Some business leaders will prefer themes that are very “visual” with lots of image sections, support for videos, and large scrolling carousel sections. Others will prefer more minimalistic themes with plenty of white space and simple components.

Still, there are a few things I think every business should prioritize when choosing a Shopify theme, such as:

• Essential features: As I mentioned above, themes don’t just affect the design of your store. Different themes can also include access to features that might be essential for your business, such as age verification pages, countdown timers, or mega menus. Remember, you can sort through theme designs in our Shopify theme gallery based on the specific features you need.
• Niche appeal: Most Shopify themes are designed to suit companies from a specific industry or niche. They include specific features that make them more appealing to companies in these sectors. For example, a theme for a fashion company might include larger image sections, or options to add size charts and color swatches to product pages.
• Customization options: All Shopify themes are customizable, but some will limit how much you can actually change before you need to dive into complicated code. Looking for a theme with a lot of pre-existing sections you can alter to suit your needs will give you more control when it comes to showcasing your brand.
• Responsivity: All the best Shopify themes should be able to load pages quickly, regardless of which device your customer is using. A fast, responsive theme will contribute to better customer experiences, and help to boost your SEO rankings.
• Integrations: If you’re going to be using apps for marketing, uspselling, promotions, and more on Shopify, make sure your theme can support those apps in advance. Not every theme is compatible with every Shopify app.

How We Curated This List

To bring you this list of the “best” Shopify themes available in 2024, I considered all of the factors above, and gathered insights from the development and design experts here at Ecomm.Design. Our team has years of experience analyzing the best ecommerce websites, which we showcase in our design galleries, to inspire and support companies from all industries.

When selecting popular themes, we also consider the overall popularity of the theme, examining how often its used by high-performing companies and brands, using our Shopify theme detector.

How to Choose the Best Shopify Theme for Your Store

In a moment, I’ll introduce you to some of the top free and premium themes available for Shopify stores (and explain what makes them so special). However, before we dive in, I wanted to share some quick tips to help you make an informed decision for your ecommerce store.

Here are the best practices you should follow when choosing a Shopify theme.

Know Your Brand

A Shopify theme is an excellent way to project your brand’s personality to everyone who visits your store. The right theme can draw attention to the nature of your company, showing customers whether you’re innovative, modern, fun-loving, respectable, or sophisticated.

Defining exactly what you want people to think and feel about your brand before you choose your theme will help you to analyze each option carefully. Just remember, you can also add elements of your branding to any theme, by adjusting the fonts, colors, and logos on your store.

Examine Your Target Audience

Once you’ve identified the core characteristics of your brand’s identity, the next step is thinking about your target audience. In other words, who do you want to reach with your products and services?

If you’re targeting a younger audience, you might use a theme with brighter colors and more eye-catching visuals, like Gifs and videos.

If you’re trying to reach a professional audience, you may choose a theme with a minimalistic design, and more spaces where you can showcase social proof, credentials, and valuable information.

Identifying your audience will help you to determine not just what style of theme you should use, but also which key features you’ll need, like age verification pages, or color swatches.

Read Reviews and Test Themes

Before choosing a theme, I always recommend reading reviews and testimonials from other companies. You can search for the name of your chosen theme online to find professional reviews, or just click on the “Reviews” tab” on the Shopify theme store.

It’s also worth noting you don’t have to commit to any theme straight away. You can try out theme “previews” to see how well they work for your company.

Most premium themes on the Shopify theme store even come with an unlimited free trial, so you only pay when you “publish” the theme on your store.

Customizing Your Shopify Theme

As I mentioned above, the extent to which you can customize your Shopify theme will depend on the theme you choose.

However, most themes, free and paid will allow you to make basic changes to design, structure, and layout, to highlight your brand and optimize the user experience.

The easiest way to get started with Shopify theme customization, is to use the built-in “theme editor” on your Shopify dashboard. Once you log into Shopify, click on the “Themes” tab, and you should see your current theme, and your theme library.

You can customize both your current theme, and themes you have waiting in your library by clicking the “Customize” button, next to the theme name.

Customizing Shopify Themes in the Theme Editor

Once you click on the “Customize” button in your Shopify admin, you’ll be sent to Shopify’s flexible theme editor. The editor will show you a “tree view” of the content for the template you’re viewing in your left-hand side bar”.

Typically, you’ll start on the Home page, but you can click on any page template to edit the sections, and appearance of the page.

Notably, within the theme editor you customize the “page templates”, which means any page using the same template will show the same changes.

With the “preview inspector”, you can click on any outlined element on a page to open the corresponding setting, and make changes to things like font and font size, images, colors, and more.

You’ll also be able to add blocks and sections within the preview inspector, and move them around on the page, by dragging and dropping them into the right location.

Notably, you can also choose on “theme settings”, to change things like your logo, colors, typography, layout, animations, buttons, media, and more. The number of “settings” you can change will ultimately depend on the theme you choose.

Adding Custom Code to Shopify Themes

Within the Shopify theme editor, you can customize various Shopify template sections, by adjusting their settings. For instance, you can add your logo image to your header, adjust the footer, and experiment with different features in each specific page section.

If you want to go deeper, and add more functionality to your theme, or adjust how parts of your pages work, you’ll need to add custom code. At this point, I recommend working with a Shopify expert or developer, to ensure you get the right results.

If you already have developer knowledge, all you need to do to start adding “CSS” to your themes, is log into your Shopify admin, click on “Online Store”, then “Themes”, and choose the theme you want to edit. Click on “Customize”, then go to the “Theme Settings” section, and select “Custom CSS”.

You can also add custom CSS to specific sections of your theme, by clicking on the section you want to add the code to in the Theme Editor, then clicking on “Custom CSS”, you’ll find this option at the bottom of the “Section Properties Panel”.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)