Shopify is one of the numerous platforms for electronic trade. The option of its free themes has been leveraged for many small-scale and beginner businesses. While there are numerous options of themes to suit the different needs of stores, it is important to be careful in your choice of a theme.
You have only 50 milliseconds to create an impression with your customers. Therefore, themes can help your site stand out in the eCommerce market to win your competitors. The Shopify themes are various in styles, features. Usually, each theme is optimized for specific industries with different sizes of product lines. As a result, the variety of themes drags the variety of Shopify theme issues. When you set up and customize the store by yourself, your site may get some troubles such as not being compatible with different devices. Therefore, it is important to be careful in your choice of a theme.
In this article, we will discuss three options of free, easy-to-customize, and use Shopify themes, Shopify theme issues, and available solutions.
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Free Shopify themes with pros and cons
There are quite a number of free themes that conveniently compete with paid themes on Shopify and we have listed three top-choice free themes with their pros and cons. Shopify officially released and supported these themes. They satisfy different website needs.
Debut – for small catalogs
The Debut theme is a very popular theme among beginner websites. With little or no technical skills, one can create a professional website with the Debut theme. The features listed below stand it out amongst other themes.
Top features
The product filtering feature helps to personalize customer’s search.
The multi-level menu allows for a decluttered website outlook. It improves the category and navigation around the website.
Another mouthwatering feature of the debut theme is the customer testimonial section. You are allowed to manually input customer feedback. Consequently, it can improve your brand identity and customer engagement.
Pros
- Flexible: It can be used from scratch while building a new website. Or it can be used as a modification to your existing store’s theme.
- Professional: It has a professional outlook and gives the website a clean till finish.
- It offers so much with less.
- There’s room for embedded videos.
Cons
- It is best for websites with photography and video contents.
Minimal – for medium catalogs
The minimal theme is suited to websites whose core is centered around “less is more”. Because it runs a simple pattern for a store building, customization, and management. The theme operates at an equilibrium between basic and professional.
The minimal theme has three variants. They are vintage style, fashion style, and modern style. Below are key features of this theme.
Top features
The slideshow feature ensures that customers can already see some of the products from the homepage.
Another key feature is the image zoom feature. It ensures that customers note every detail right to the little piece.
Pros
- The theme has a mobile-friendly setup.
- Neat and concise organization of products via the drop down navigation tool.
Cons
- There’s not much room for modification.
Supply – for large catalogs
The supply theme is minimalist in outlook. It is able to accommodate large inventories with over 50 products.
It is mostly suited to stores with a large customer base and variety of products. The structure of the theme allows for easy navigation around the webpage. There are two options of the theme design; the Blue or choose the Light version.
Top features
The backend features allow for high customizability.
The slideshow feature aids sales and visitor s’ navigation around the website. Like the Debut theme, it is customer-oriented. It has a collection filtering feature that aids personalized shopping.
Pros
- Good knowledge of SEO will improve the visibility of your store and products.
- The drop-down feature ensures that the outlook of the website is clean and spacious.
- The supply theme features social media icons. Moreover, this makes the website look more professional and worthy.
- Supply has payment method pages and this facilitates exchange.
- Free updates on website activities are offered to users.
- The theme is mobile-friendly.
Cons
- The theme does not support old browsers.
Common Shopify theme issues
Like you can already tell, themes are customization tools that ensure that your website is unique to your product type, the needs of your target market, and your preferences. They not only serve aesthetic functions but determine the operation of the website too. So, the choice of a Shopify theme is probably as important as your branding decisions.
Shopify offers over 100 different themes to users to help improve their sales experience. Some of these themes are free while others are not. For detail, below we’ll touch on the common issues that theme users face in the application and management of Shopify themes.
These issues are grouped into two major classification:
1. Theme Issues Related to Compatibility
The compatibility of themes with browsers or devices is common Shopify theme issues. These themes are most times not designed to comply with the HTML, CSS, or JavaScript code of all the types of browsers or devices. So what happens is that the design format and order of the web page gets distorted when opened on certain browsers or devices.
For instance, it is possible for your menu to appear as intended on Chrome, and put up different gaps and padding when opened on Internet Explorer or Edge.
How to fix
This issue can be easily fixed. It only requires the attention of the theme developer. Firstly, you should get detailed information about the non-compliant browser, the operating system or device, and the issue that occurred. This will help in determining the steps to be taken in troubleshooting and repair. After that, you can notify the Shopify support team for help.
If your theme is free, chances are that the problem is a basic, easy-to-fix problem. In this case, the solution can be spending a few minutes reading through Shopify tutorials to get the issue fixed. And if it is impossible to fix it this way, then you can leverage the free one-hour help offered by Shopify for theme customization issues.
Other options are the live chat support and the Shopify customer support app. The support team is available round the clock. Then they will support usually within a short period of time.
Meanwhile, for paid themes, you have no business contacting the support team at Shopify. These paid themes are usually created by third parties. So refer to the theme developer to get relevant repair instructions.
2. Theme issues related to Customization
Now, this is another broad categorization of Shopify theme issues. This category involves challenges related to Shopify theme configuration modification.
Shopify themes give wide options for customization and uniqueness of stores. In detail, there is the option of color change, order, font, sizing, and a lot of other basic options. Some themes offer advanced options such as inputting text, defining URLs or menus, and toggling certain options on and off.
Issues emanating from changes made to these theme settings files fall under Shopify theme issues but configuration issues have more to do with code modifications made to additional theme files. These Shopify theme configurations are directly affected by the product.liquid or theme.liquid file. This is the reason they are called “add ons” or “extras”. These configurations go beyond the core features. Also, they are not native to the original theme.
In this case, your theme issue is caused by additional modifications, which are beyond the theme settings file. If so, you have a Shopify theme configuration problem on your hands. The troubleshooting of Shopify theme configuration issues takes a different route compared to theme issues.
This category of issue is more complex than those earlier discussed. They are difficult to detect and totally out of the scope of the support team at Shopify. This is true because
- Theme developers are not familiar with the extended code.
- Customizations can conflict with the existing code.
- Customization issues generally go beyond the base feature set of the theme.
- In cases where there have been multiple add-ons or extended codes, it is difficult to determine the particular code or add-on that is causing issues.
For these reasons, theme developers aren’t your go-to for support on customization issues. Your best bet is to get the expertise of an expert.
How to fix
Follow this list of solution tips to troubleshoot and rectify customization issues.
- Check out the number of themes you have installed. By principle, your Shopify admin can not take more than 20 themes at once. Exceeding this count might be a source of challenge.
- Reach out to the Shopify support team to be sure it is a customization problem.
- Keep track of the changes and update files regularly.
- Call theme developer for support
- Employ the services of experts.
Conclusion
In any case, it is important to have a good knowledge of your selected theme before using it. Therefore, you should understand how it works, its compliance with add-ons, the support community, and other important details. Once you understand these and it works well for you, then you can go on to apply the theme. Before you commence customization, create a backup file, read or watch tutorial videos and note the effect that each stage of customization works on the webpage. All of these make it easy to troubleshoot and manage themes.
If after these, you still have any difficulty in managing your theme modification, then you can contact us at HappyPoints.
HappyPoints can help you solve the above issues. Contact us to describe your problems, we’ll support you.
