Starting an online store spares you from decorating a physical store. Yet, you must make your business website desirable to your customers. It’s by using Shopify themes that you get to dress your website. It gives your customers an idea of who you are and what products or services you provide. Your goal is to give them the best experience so that they won’t go away after a few seconds. It works not only for aesthetics’ sake but for your sales to grow.
Shopify is the best platform for building your store online if you’re starting out. In this best Shopify themes review, we will break down everything you need to learn about the best Shopify themes. We list both free and premium options that can help you boost the quality of your website.
Table of Contents
Why Is Your Shopify Theme Important?
The competition online is stiff, so you need to set yourself apart from other websites. Using a good Shopify theme is the best way to do it.
Now, you can’t be a one-man show for designing your online shop. Themes serve as your template to ease the customization process. Themes determine what you can do with your store’s design depending on your industry and brand. It helps you achieve the way you want your store to look to online shoppers. There’s everything you could choose from Shopify themes. You could be funky or prim and proper.
Themes contribute to higher conversion rates, too. The success of your site also depends on the loading time of your page. You could lose 25% of your visitors if it takes 4 seconds to load, so it’s best to choose themes that are optimized.
Themes guide your customers and give them a sense of direction. It’s your job to provide them with a slick and functional website.
What Should You Look for in a Shopify Theme?
Shopify provides you with hundreds of themes. They have their pros and cons, so it’s impossible to be absolute of which one is the best. Yet, these are the key features you should look for:
Easy to Edit
Look for themes that are easy to edit as you need to customize your theme according to your brand and industry. Most themes don’t need you to crack any code. But some themes require more apps or third-party app installments to edit features.
More Customization Options
Who would want to have similar websites with competitors? Each theme provides sections and settings that you can customize. Choose a theme that provides you lots of customization options. Explore its layout, content, typography, and colors. Personalize your site as much you can.
Mobile Responsiveness
Mobile commerce is expected to hit $488.0 billion in 2024. The two key devices that affect it are smartphones and tablets. With this, Shopify mandates all Shopify themes to be mobile-friendly. So it’s best to look for themes that are primed for mobile responsiveness. Choose themes that don’t compromise features on smaller screens.
Effective Support
Problems may arise while you’re developing your website. It’s best to have a respected developer to back you up. You can also read reviews on other retailers’ experience in installing the themes. You can learn from their reviews the quality of support from the theme’s developer.
Where Can You Find Shopify Themes?
There are three types of themes: free, premium, and third-party. You can find most free Shopify themes on the official Shopify store.
You can also find themes from general marketplaces:
Other stores and independent developers include:
Now that you what to look for in a Shopify theme and where to find them, here is our list of the best Shopify themes in 2021:{#best-shopify-themes-2021}
1. Porto
Shopify store using Porto: Procam
Theme Price: $129
Porto is one of the best overall Shopify themes, and over 45,000 eCommerce users trust it. It’s a great package built on UI and UX design and experience.
It suits any kind of niche and store as it comes with over 20 modern and classic demos. The developers said they will release more clean niche demos soon.
Porto is optimized for speed performance to boost your sales. We like that it has a speed optimization wizard that other themes lack. It’s SEO-friendly with unlimited product detail page variations. It works well on any screen resolutions and mobile devices.
It provides you lots of useful options to configure your store. You can choose from 20 unique homepage layouts with 25 pre-made demos for you to follow. It has unlimited color options and 300 Google fonts. It comes with several headers and menu options like Menus, Search Icons, Mini Cart, and more. If you can’t find what you need, you can also create your own. You can customize all sections from each demo or combine sections or features from certain demos depending on your needs.
Porto is compatible with major apps and tons of Shopify extensions. It’s always up to date with its CSS 3 technologies providing you great animation effects.
For any issue, you can contact its support center. They also provide online documentation and video documentation for you to refer to.
2. Wokiee
Shopify store using Wookie: Krate Wear
Theme Price: $99
Wookie is from Envato Market and it has over 8,000 sales so far. It’s a multipurpose theme, making it a perfect choice for whatever store you own. It includes over 86 homepage layouts with 99+ content blocks for easy edit. It has 6+ product page variants, 7 collection page variants, and tons of header variants. Wookie contains many customization options to incorporate your branding. Likewise, it provides an advanced Shopify Admin Panel to make your customization process easy.
You don’t need to install other apps to improve the SEO of your website. Wookie is search engine optimized as checked by the MOZ SEO tool. It also works well for dropshippers, allowing them to import hundreds of products from different platforms like Oberlo.
What makes Wookie stand out from the rest? It includes options for powerful filters on shop pages with no third-party app. Plus, you can integrate your Instagram and display your feed on your Shopify store.
When it comes to customer service, the support staff manually processes concerns round the clock, Monday to Friday.
3. Universe
Shopify store using Universe: ergonofis
Theme Price:
- $180 standard costs for one store license
- $290 extended package costs for three store licenses
- $540 agency costs for ten store licenses
The Universe theme is created by Outlane.co. It’s an all-inclusive multipurpose Shopify theme that’s optimized for dropshipping. One of the things that we like about it is its focus on giving the best experience for your mobile customers.
Its homepage provides you with a plethora of customization tools. You can use a product carousel to showcase your best products or promote sale items on your homepage. If you want to make your page dynamic, you can embed a YouTube video, background videos, and animated icons.
Its product page features a product zoom. Customers get a better look at the product when they are using mobiles. To increase the legitimacy of your store, you can add product reviews to your product pages. It also gives your customers the ability to add or edit their carts without leaving the page.
One cool feature of the Universe theme is that it caters to international customers. With its currency switches, customers can check prices in their respective currencies. This theme is an excellent choice for dropshipping stores.
4. Ella
Shopify store using Ella: Ira House of Designers
Theme Price: $79
Ella tops the number of downloads on theThemeforest Marketplace and has an overall score of 4.8. It has over 15 layouts that are set differently for the following shops:
- Tea and Coffee
- Swimwear
- Glasses
- Jewelry and Accessories
- Sports Apparel
- Beauty and Health
- Electronics
- Car and Auto Parts
- Watch
- Bags
You can choose from 9+ product page layouts and 7+ category page layouts for you to get more ideas. It’s compatible with popular browsers Opera, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
Other powerful features include multi-languages and different currency support for global commerce. It also has a newsletter form in a pop-up. This supports integration with Mailchimp to convert visitors to regular customers.
It also adds a lazy load feature that other themes lack. It makes your product images load faster when customers view them in browsers.
Its Ajax Cart refreshes the cart icon instead of the entire page when customers click the “add to cart”. Combined with its drop-down cart, the customers can edit orders with less hassle. They don’t have to leave the page because the drop-down menu displays the list of items.
Another cool thing about Ella is its out-of-stock feature. It allows a customer to submit a form. In return, it will notify them when that item is available. This feature ensures you don’t lose any customers or visitors.
Ella theme offers impressive features with its price lower than other themes.
5. Roxxe
Shopify store using Roxxe: Studio trap sounds
Theme Price: $48
Roxxe is another multipurpose Shopify theme following the current modernization in web design. It comes with over 60 prebuilt homepage examples. You can choose from fashion and beauty, electronics, gifts, and even pets. With the Shopify Visual Builder, you can build as many homepage layouts as you need. Its multifaceted website design includes 50 pre-designed layouts.
It supports a mega menu, so you can add links, images, and banners to guide customers to pages and collections. What makes it more impressive? Roxxe has a quick view option. It provides a pop-up of product details for customers to read. They don’t need to leave the collection itself if they want to examine the product.
It’s compatible with popular apps like Oberlo, eBay, Amazon, and Weglot. It reached A95 in its Page Speed Score and YSlow Score.
Its product page is neat with the images on the left and the product information on the right. It works well with other integrations. The Email Collection Bar registers emails from visitors while Trust Hero displays security badges to your customers.
We like that it’s quite responsive because its mobile layouts are simple. It contains both LTR and RTL languages, including Arabic, Urdu, and Hebrew.
6. Boost
Shopify store using Boost: ALOHAS
Theme Price: $180
Boost is a versatile theme designed by Clean Canvas. It provides you with 3 styles: Spark, Inspire, and Flourish. All themes are customizable with their content sections on the home page. It’s SEO and mobile-friendly, and it has drop-down navigation support, built-in styles, and color palettes. It provides free stock photos by Burst, and it provides free theme updates.
Boost is famous for its creative use of space. Its 3 styles provide you with various looks that will work perfectly for different niches.
Its predictive search feature displays live search results and links to articles, pages, and products. It also features related products and blog posts. You can tag images by creating link labels for your products to be easily discovered.
7. Mobilia
Web store using Mobilia: Fancy Sip
Theme Price: $180
Mobilia is a responsive Shopify theme designed by Out of the Sandbox. It’s a modern and flexible theme that features a myriad of ways to tell your shop’s story. It includes fonts, slideshows, videos, social feeds, and custom content. It features 4 styles: Milan, Napa, Sydney, and Tokyo.
If you have medium-sized catalogs, this theme is the way to go. Mobilia displays menu lists on your store’s homepage for the customers to navigate large catalogs. It displays related products on your product pages to give more options to customers. Its support team is known for its excellent customer support.
Its latest update included a mega menu feature and FAQ template.
8. Shella
Shopify store using Shella: Moda Mare Positano
Theme Price: $79
Shella is a premium fashion Shopify theme. It features a modern design with 68 pre-designed pages. It has 19 skins for boutique, books, jewelry, kitchen, cakes, pasta, and many more. You can choose from a hundred options of many headers and footer types.
What makes Shella different from other themes? It has an infinite scroll on its collection page. This feature makes this theme a perfect choice for bigger catalogs.
It’s dropshipping ready as it’s compatible with famous platforms like Printify, Printful, and Ali Express.
Shella theme cares about your page speed load so its turbo speed scored 95 on mobile and 99 on desktop. It sells in 133 currencies with Shopify payments. Various pop-ups include newsletters with images, newsletters, coupon codes, and purchase notification. For the subscription list, you have two options: MailChimp and an internal Shopify list.
What more? It comes with a shipping progress bar for customers to track their purchases with ease.
9. Supply
Shopify store using Supply: Juan Gadget
Theme Price: Free
Supply is a free theme developed by Shopify that focuses on customer-oriented capabilities. It gives a feeling of old school look but with a touch of modern design that works well for the minimalists. It comes in two styles: Blue or Light. Both are customizable that share the same features.
Supply is ideal for owners who have large inventories. It can feature over 50 products with up to five collections. The position of the photos and collections is neat to avoid clutter, which is what we like about it.
Unlike other free themes, Supply can hold more than 50 products. It’s ideal for niches that have tons of product types like cameras and fashion accessories. You can even maximize your homepage by featuring up to six from the usual four collections.
You can go far with Supply by changing the elements of your header page. For the footer, you can add essential documents including the About Us page. You can also tick boxes that show the payment options you accept. For the product page, you can customize it by creating discounts. You can also show customers the amount of money they can save if they buy right away.
These outstanding features are possible for free with Supply. Other themes don’t have these and will require you to integrate a third-party app.
10. Lezada
Shopify store using Lezada: Bare Skin Bar
Theme Price: $48
Lezada is a fashion Shopify theme with several fashion demos you can install. Yet, it’s multipurpose and can be used for different eCommerce sites. This theme is ideal for electronics, accessories, fashion products, and other retail products. It has a solid underlying structure built on Bootstrap 4, CSS3, and HTML 5. These make the theme responsive and SEO-friendly. Its page speed scored B87 and B80 in YSlow. It supports 152 currencies with Shopify Payments. This allows customers to pay in their local currency.
It provides you impressive features. It comes with 220 homepage versions, 11 different Revolution Slider layouts, and 40 different drag-and-drop sections. There are many choices for you to experiment with!
Getting overwhelmed? Don’t fret! The process doesn’t need complicated coding, just point and click the options you want to select and you’re good to go.
11. Minimal
Shopify store using Minimal: Italy Station
Theme Price: Free
As the name itself says, it’s a minimalist theme. Minimal comes in three styles: vintage, modern, and fashion. It’s a free theme design by Shopify. If you’re a beginner, you can maximize this theme. This will allow you to create a product-focus web look. It gives the most basic yet professional design where you can build your store with less hassle.
Minimal includes a slideshow and home page video on your homepage. This allows you to display several images. You can also add some CTA buttons to direct to product or collection pages. It allows product image zoom so that customers can visually inspect the product. You can edit the header and footer smoothly to match your branding style.
Minimal has a cool feature that provides a preview when you search your product or blog posts online. It makes SEO adjustments convenient for you.
12. Icon
Shopify store using Icon: Qbedding
Theme Price: $180
Icon is designed by We are Underground. Images are what customers look at first in choosing a product—Icon theme lives for this. It highlights images with the belief that images speak for themselves. It’s optimized for larger images, so you can showcase product images in your store. It lets you showcase your products in a slideshow. Meanwhile, a product quick review is also available for customers to view details hassle-free.
It has 4 presets for you to choose from: Dolce, Christian, Yves, and Vera. All presets come with customizable content and sections. It also has built-in styles and color palettes to match your personality. It comes with free stock photos by Burst too.
13. Brooklyn
Shopify store using Brooklyn: Men’s Luxury Boutique
Theme Price: Free
Brooklyn is an elegant free theme officially supported by Shopify. It’s designed for modern apparel stores and highlights brand imagery. To fully enjoy the theme’s advantage, use the header slideshow and showcase multiple brand images at the top of your home page. Or if you have an outstanding video to tell your brand story, you can feature it in the center as well.
The theme’s dynamic product grid makes the layout of the products change automatically. This makes you showcase your collections with less hassle.
Brooklyn comes with two presets: Classic and Playful. The classic preset gives you a simple yet appealing look for your collections. On the flip side, the Playful preset allows you to create pop-up product images.
This theme is ideal for store owners who have loaded a large amount of inventory into Shopify.
14. Avone
Shopify store using Avone: Let’s Make Art
Theme Price: $79
Avone is a fully responsive premium Shopify theme designed by Adorn Themes. It features 1,000 theme options, making it the most customizable theme among the rest. It’s a multipurpose theme that offers impressive features.
Avone is optimized for fast loading speed with a score of 98 for its desktop speed and 85 for mobile speed. It has 28+ homepages, 10+ shop pages, 8+ product pages, and 10+ header styles. What’s the edge of Avone? You can interchange elements and features from different demos.
It’s compatible with Oberlo, making it convenient to import products in minutes. It’s mobile-optimized, so the design works well with any kind of smartphone and tablet. It also supports different pop-ups. These include product video, shipping info, 360-degree product view, and product inquiry.
Avone has built-in share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Gallery. This social media integration makes digital marketing easier for you. Likewise, it supports MailChimp for your email marketing.
Its effective support team provides help through its unique ticket system. They assign each concern with a ticket number, and customers can track responses and progress online. They answer within 24 hours a day from Monday to Friday.
Avone is the #1 Shopify Theme recommended by Envato tuts+.
15. Furnitto
Theme Price: $99
Furnitto is a responsive Shopify theme designed by TemplateMonster. The theme is created explicitly for furniture online stores. It has adaptive functions to display correctly on any device. The theme design has a flexible layout where you can customize widgets and page layouts. It also has an online chat functionality to support shoppers. The theme is highly optimized for search engines and is compatible with all major browsers as well.
Best Shopify Themes FAQs
What is the best converting Shopify theme?
Shoptimized is considered the best premium converting Shopify theme. It contains over 30 conversion-boosting features.
While Debutify touts itself as the best converting free Shopify theme. They claim that customers save over $2,000 and over 50+ web hours a year.
What is the best free Shopify theme?
There is no definitive answer to this since themes don’t have the same niches. Yet, if you’re just starting with your online store, we recommend Brooklyn and Minimal for you. These free themes are highly customizable according to your personal needs. They are officially supported by Shopify. This ensures the great support you can receive from them while using the themes.
Is it worth buying a Shopify theme?
Yes, it’s worth buying a Shopify theme. When your sales increase and your business expands, so do your business needs. There’s no doubt premium themes provide you with more options free themes lack. You’ll have more design options, built-in features, greater experience, and direct theme support.
Why are Shopify themes so expensive?
Because developing and maintaining premium themes is not free. It requires a high level of knowledge and coding experience. The developers have invested their time to build these themes with coding. In turn, you don’t have to waste time and resources on learning how to code. Instead, developers provide you with customization options. You only need to pay a one-time fee to adopt the theme and make it your own.
What are the best Shopify themes for dropshipping?
Some themes are dropshipping ready and here are the top 3:
What are the best Shopify themes for clothing?
Personalization is a must factor in choosing Shopify themes for clothing. These themes allow you to do that:
Best Shopify Themes Conclusion
There’s a lot of Shopify themes that can help you establish your website. All themes share the same features but aren’t perfect for all niches. One theme might work well for you but not for others. It’s only you who can identify the best Shopify theme. It’s the one that suits your brand perfectly, boosts your website, and generates more sales.
Look for the important features and functionalities we have mentioned above. Make sure they are updated and adaptable to trends. Check out the themes we have listed for you. With this, your online store will start off on the right foot!