Shopify themes provide more than just the front end look and feel - they also impact your admin experience, your web performance and the ongoing costs to maintain and add front-end features as you grow.

The Shopify Theme Store offers a handful of free themes developed by Shopify itself, and over 100 Premium options costing up to $400 USD created by theme developer partners.

You may be wondering “are paid Shopify themes worth it?” when you can get Dawn (and its siblings) for free — especially if you’re a dev shop that gets paid to build.

But Dawn is about a stripped down as it gets. If you choose a feature-rich paid theme from the jump, it can save you hundreds of dev hours and deliver mucho value from day one.

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 (or you really love to code).

However, if you’re growing your store or are a serious business, you’ll soon find you outgrow what they have to offer. And if you’re a dev shop, you’ll spend time and client budget “reinventing the wheels” with free themes compared to paid options with more ready-to-use capabilities.

Premium Shopify themes

Premium themes, particularly from experienced theme developers like Clean Canvas, ship with a lot of value out of the box. They’re typically 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 theme developers’ core business, they also receive serious reinvestment into enhancements and general maintenance to ensure they remain competitive and valuable.

White glove support is another major benefit for paid themes — and not all theme developers provide the same level of hand-holding. You can vet a theme developer’s support through Reviews on each theme listing.

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 customization 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.

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 deep 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 offers a portfolio of Premium Shopify Themes that

• 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

Check out Clean Canvas in the Shopify Theme Store