Set up a development version of my store

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A store owner wants to create a development environment to test potentially breaking changes without affecting their live store. They need to clone not just the theme, but all products, metadata, and store configurations—excluding checkout functionality.

Current situation:

  • Initially assumed becoming a Shopify Partner (which is free) was a paid service
  • Now signed up as a partner to access development store capabilities
  • Found apps that can handle most of the heavy lifting for store duplication

Key challenges:

  • Much of their work involves metadata and product organization, not just theme files
  • Making these changes directly on the live store would be unprofessional
  • Currently dissatisfied with their paid theme’s performance (poor page speed scores)

Outcome: The user has resolved their main question by becoming a Shopify Partner, which enables creating development stores for testing purposes.

Summarized with AI on November 3. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I’m not an official Shopify developer or partner - is there a way for me to clone my store to a development store so I can develop and make probably shop-breaking changes without ruining my production store?

DIY answers only please, I’m not looking to hire anyone or pay for an app. I just want to know if this is possible.

EDIT: it’s free to become a Shopify Partner and thus be able to make dev stores, I assumed that was a paid thing. OK great.

Many thanks,

Gareth

2

Hello Gareth,

You can simply duplicate the live theme and start working on it.
I mean start working on a duplicate version without impacting the live theme/store.

Regards
Guleria

1 Like
3

Thank you.

Problem isn’t the theme, really, that would be simple enough - what I want to do is create a dev version of my store with all products, all of our weird metadata etc, basically everything except checkout.

(I actually hate the theme we have - we chose a paid one that the team liked, but I’ve spent so much time customising it anyway that I may aswell have just forked Dawn and saved myself £300. It’s slow, too, page speed scores in lighthouse are unacceptably low. It’s therefore tempting to export everything BUT the theme and use the excuse to start over.)

Half the stuff I’ll be working on isn’t in theme files but metadata and how we organise our products. Mucking about with this on the live store would be unprofessional.

It looks like there are apps that will do most of this heavy lifting, and I signed up for partner so I can now create a dev store.

G