Almost every redesign message I get starts the same way. The site looks dated. We need a new theme.
Sometimes that is true. More often the theme is fine and the trouble is what was put inside it. I know that sounds like something a designer says to avoid work, but stay with me, because the two problems cost very different money. A new theme means rebuilding every page in the store. Fixing what sits inside a healthy theme can be done one page at a time, with no launch day and nobody holding their breath.
I look after a Shopify store myself, as creative director of Skin Boutique Online. Lately I have also spent a lot of time inside other skincare and beauty stores, looking at what works and what does not. Each time I ask the same question. Should they customise the theme they have, switch to another one, or pay for a custom build? This is how I answer it. My examples are from skincare, but you can use the same thinking for any Shopify store.
First, separate the theme from what is inside it
A theme gives you the structure. Templates, sections, how the menu behaves, how a product page is laid out, what happens on a phone. That is all.
It will not write your headline. It will not shoot your photos. It has no idea which product a visitor should see first. You decide those things, and if you decided them badly, a new theme will show the same bad decisions in a nicer typeface.
Going through those stores, I kept seeing the same things, and almost none of them were the theme’s fault:
- A homepage that opens with a slideshow of banners that have nothing to do with each other. No single message gets through.
- A headline with the brand name in it and not a word about what the brand sells or who it is for.
- Product photos with different backgrounds, different crops and different light.
- Nothing near the top that gives me a reason to trust the store. No review count, no press mention, no plain line about where the product is made.
- Collections shown in the order somebody created them, with the best seller at the bottom.
You can fix every one of these in almost any current theme.
So before you blame the theme, try this. Take your homepage and one product page. Rewrite the headline so it says what you sell and for whom. Cut the hero down to one image and one button. Put your strongest proof right under it. Move your best seller to the front of the first row. If the theme let you do all of that from the editor, and the page now makes sense, you do not have a theme problem. You have a content project, and you can close this tab.
If the theme fought you at every step, keep reading.
Signs that the theme really is the limit
Here is when I stop blaming the content.
You cannot build the page you need without code
Current Shopify themes let you add, remove and reorder sections on every type of page, straight from the theme editor. Older themes only allowed that on the homepage. If your product and collection pages are fixed layouts and the only thing you can change is the text, you are on the old kind.
That is expensive in a quiet way. Every new idea becomes a job for a developer, so you stop having small ideas. And a store gets better through small ideas.
Product pages cannot hold what your customers need to know
This is the one I meet most in skincare. A title, a price and a paragraph are not enough. People want to know how to use the product, what is in it, who it is for, what goes with it and how big the bottle is. In a well built theme that information lives in metafields and shows up in tabs or accordions, in the same place on every product.
If your theme gives you one description box, everything gets poured into it, and each product ends up formatted by whoever happened to type it that day. That is a theme limit. It does not always mean a new theme, though. Many themes can be given sections that read metafields.
The store is slow and you cannot find out why
Run your homepage and one product page through PageSpeed Insights, on mobile. If the report is full of scripts you do not recognise, look at your apps. The ones you have installed, and also the ones you removed. Older apps wrote their code straight into the theme files and many of them left it there when they were uninstalled. A theme that has lived through five years of apps coming and going can still be loading code for tools you stopped paying for long ago.
Somebody can clean that out by hand. At some point it is cheaper to start again on a fresh copy of a current theme than to read every file.
Mobile was an afterthought
Open the store on your own phone and try to buy something with one hand. How many taps to reach a product? Can you swipe the photos without a fight? Is the add to cart button buried under a long description? Can you read the text without zooming?
Most of your visitors are probably on a phone. Check your analytics, do not take my word for it. A theme that was designed for desktop first shows its age here before anywhere else.
Everyday changes need a developer
A banner for a launch. A new line in the announcement bar. A landing page for a campaign. If each of these needs someone to edit code, the theme is costing you money every month, and you will not see it on any invoice. This is what happens to an old theme that was customised heavily. It can still look fine. Nobody in the business dares to touch it.
The theme stopped getting updates
Themes from the Shopify Theme Store are updated by the people who made them. A theme that was edited heavily in code usually cannot take those updates without losing the edits. A discontinued theme gets none. You find out the day a new Shopify feature shows up in other stores and there is nowhere to put it in yours.
It looks like every other store in your category
This one is about brand, and I take it seriously. Shopify’s free themes are well made. That is exactly why so many stores run them without changing anything. Try it on yourself: if I swapped your logo for a competitor’s, would anything else on the page feel wrong? If not, the theme works and the brand is missing.
The three options
If the theme is part of the problem, you have three ways to go. I will tell you what each one costs you, because each one costs something.
Customise the theme you have
Do this when the theme is current, the structure is sound and you can name the gaps. Usually that means a new hero, a product page that shows ingredients and usage properly, trust elements that look the same everywhere, a section for routines or bundles and a cleaner menu.
Your URLs stay where they are and your apps keep working. You can release one template, watch what happens, then do the next. I like that a lot.
The price is that you keep whatever the theme does badly, and every custom section is one more thing to look after when the theme updates. I still recommend this route more often than clients expect. A current theme with five well designed sections usually beats a new theme left on its defaults.
Switch to a different theme
Do this when the current theme is old, cluttered or missing the page building I described above, and you have found a theme that already does most of what you need. The work is rebuilding each template in the new theme, moving the content over, reconnecting the apps and styling it all to your brand.
You end up on a modern foundation with cleaner code, and your team can edit the store without calling anyone.
It takes time and it carries some risk. Every page is rebuilt, so every page has to be checked. Apps that depended on code in the old theme need setting up again. Customers who knew where things were will have to look for them. Treat a theme switch as a small migration and plan it like one. I wrote a redesign checklist for exactly that.
One warning. Do not choose a theme from its demo. Demos are built with professional photography, short product names and colours that match perfectly. You have your photos and your product names. Before you commit, load ten of your real products into a trial copy and look at the collection page. It takes an hour and it saves most of the disappointment I have seen.
Commission a custom theme
Do this when the brand needs something no existing theme can give, when the catalogue is built in an unusual way, or when the store is big enough that a small gain in clarity pays for a serious investment. A custom theme is designed around your products and contains only what you use. Nobody else will have it.
You lose the theme developer’s updates. From that day, someone you pay maintains the theme. It also takes the longest of the three, and the result is only as good as the brief. If you have a modest catalogue and no developer you can call, do not start here.
What a new theme will not change
I say this to clients early, because I have watched people expect a redesign to fix all of it.
The checkout belongs to Shopify. Your theme styles everything up to the cart, and after that your options are limited on most plans.
Your photos come with you. A new layout usually shows them bigger, which is lovely if they are good and painful if they are not.
Your words come with you too. Descriptions, headlines and claims move across exactly as they are unless somebody rewrites them.
Search rankings do not improve because the theme changed. They can get worse if the switch is careless, with changed URLs, missing redirects or page titles that got dropped along the way.
And if people leave because of the price, the shipping or the product itself, no design is going to save that. I would rather tell you now than after the invoice.
What is specific to skincare and beauty
A few things come up so often in this category that I check them before I recommend anything.
People arrive with a problem. Dry skin, sensitive skin, breakouts. They want to be pointed to a product, so the store needs a way to shop by concern or skin type, with filters that match. Some themes do this well with tags and filters. Others need custom work.
Products are used together, in an order. A section that shows the routine, each step linked to its product, sells more honestly than a row of “you may also like”.
Ingredient lists and instructions have to be complete and easy to find, in the same place on every product. Claims need wording that somebody has approved. Ask for that approved wording before anyone writes a headline. The design is there to make the information clear. It should never invent a benefit.
Makeup adds shades. Swatches have to be accurate, big enough to tap with a thumb, and connected to the right product photo.
Then proof. Reviews, press, certifications, where the product is made. Skincare runs on trust, so put the proof near the top and say it plainly. Only if it is true, and only if it is still true today.
If your theme can do these things with its own sections and a sensible metafield setup, customising is usually enough. If it can do none of them, switching gets much easier to defend.
How to decide in one afternoon
You can get to a decent first answer by yourself.
- Find the theme name and version in your Shopify admin, then see whether it is still listed and updated in the Theme Store.
- Open the theme editor on a product page. If you can add and reorder sections there, the architecture is current.
- Run the content test from the start of this article on your homepage. Write down every place the theme stopped you.
- Go as far as the checkout on your phone, one hand.
- Run PageSpeed Insights on the homepage and one product page. List the scripts you do not recognise.
- Write down the last five changes you wanted. Count how many needed code.
A current theme and a short list means customise. An old, slow theme your team cannot touch means switch. If you already switched once and still cannot build what the brand needs, then it is time to talk about a custom theme.
If you want a second opinion
Send me the store address, the theme name, the three changes you want most and your deadline if you have one. I will tell you which of the three I would choose and why. Sometimes the answer is to leave the theme alone and fix what is inside it. I will say that too.
Here is how I work with skincare brands, here is the full web design and SEO scope, and here is where to start a project.
