Pages getting unassigned from their templates

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

A Shopify store owner reported pages periodically losing their template assignments or having templates deleted entirely, occurring roughly once per month on a Dawn theme site.

Root Cause Identified:

  • The issue stemmed from accidentally switching between themes
  • When themes are changed, custom templates don’t automatically transfer
  • The client had inadvertently activated a duplicate theme while attempting modifications

Key Insights:

  • This is a common Shopify platform issue, not caused by apps or third-party modifications
  • Even default product templates can be affected when theme switching occurs
  • Multiple store owners experience similar problems and confusion

Solution:

  • Verify the correct theme is currently live
  • Reassign pages/products to existing templates in the active theme
  • Alternatively, reactivate the previous draft theme to restore original template assignments

Status: Resolved once theme switching was identified as the cause.

Summarized with AI on October 27. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

We have many Shopify sites but one is having a strange issue. A few pages periodically get unassigned from their page template, and sometimes the page template gets deleted altogether. Does anyone know why this might be happening or maybe there’s an app out there that can track Admin changes for page templates? It happens about once a month. It’s using the Dawn theme.

2

Hey @funnelboost ,

Interesting Question.

Most of my clients face the same issues. And later on, most of them blame me that I delete the template for the store. I even saw that the Default Product template is deleted automatically to, which is very neccassary andthe default template.

Okay, later further I noticed that we can make the page layout based on the template without reverting them or get back to it.
Here is the best solution.

  • Make sure you are on the same theme as you were using before. because sometimes you make the Live theme of the Duplicate and Duplicate theme might have totally different templates as compared to the live theme.
  • If you still confident that you using the same theme, then you need to assign the products to the exisitng templates.

This issue is coming from Shopify itself. No one Shopify app can delete the Existing templates or make changes to them.

If this was helpful mark as Solution and like it.

Thanks

1 Like
3

Thanks, yep right after posting the question I noticed that the theme was changed - apparently the client had been trying to do something and accidentally switched themes. It’d be nice if Shopify had the ability to copy over custom templates when doing that.

Thanks for your response!

4

You can make these templates back again by making the Draft theme live again that was live before.