What is the best way to customize theme code and keep up with updates?

Store Design

Topic summary

The discussion addresses managing theme customizations while maintaining the ability to apply future updates.

Key Challenge:
Unlike WordPress child themes, Shopify lacks a native child theme feature, making it difficult to preserve customizations when updating themes.

Recommended Best Practices:

  • Use Theme Kit: Shopify’s command line tool enables local development and preview before deploying changes, reducing risk to the live store
  • Create duplicate themes: Test all modifications on a copy before publishing, allowing safe experimentation without affecting the live site
  • Implement version control: Use Git or similar systems to track changes, enabling easy rollback if issues arise
  • Minimize customizations: Fewer modifications make updates more manageable
  • Consider Shopify apps: For custom functionality, apps may be preferable to direct theme code modifications

Note: The more extensive the customizations, the more challenging future theme updates become. Following these workflows helps balance customization needs with maintainability.

Summarized with AI on November 22. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hi,

I’ve been wondering what the best practice are for customising theme code and being able to keep up with theme updates at the same time?

When editing the theme code, I can’t stay up to date with new updates of themes anymore.

In Wordpress the best practice is to make a child theme. Are there any similar best practices for Shopify that makes it possible to keep up to date with theme updates?

Looking forward to your replies.

Thanks

1 Like
2

Hey @rdaniel ,

Yes, making a child theme is a great way to maintain customizations to your theme while still being able to receive updates from the original theme. Unfortunately, Shopify does not have a similar concept to child themes. However, there are some best practices that can help you manage your customizations in a way that makes it easier to apply updates to your theme:

  • Use a Theme Kit: Shopify provides a command line tool called Theme Kit, which allows you to make changes to your theme code and preview them locally before deploying to your live store. This makes it easier to manage and track changes to your theme code, and also helps you avoid breaking your live store.
  • Create a duplicate theme: Before making any changes to your theme code, it is a good idea to create a duplicate theme. This way, you can make changes to the duplicate theme without affecting your live store. Once you are happy with the changes, you can then publish the duplicate theme as your new live theme.
  • Use a version control system: Use a version control system like Git to track changes to your theme code. This allows you to revert to previous versions of your code if something goes wrong, and also makes it easier to manage and review changes to your code.
  • Minimize customizations: Try to minimize the number of customizations you make to your theme. The more customizations you make, the more difficult it will be to apply updates to your theme. If you need to add custom functionality to your store, consider using a Shopify app instead of modifying your theme code.

By following these best practices, you can make it easier to manage customizations to your Shopify store theme and keep up to date with theme updates.