When will theme updates stop erasing previous coding?

Store Design
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AI-generated summary

Issue: Updating customized Shopify themes can erase manual code edits.

Current understanding: Basic settings may transfer during updates, but custom code added to theme files typically does not.

Reason given: Each new theme version introduces features and code changes that can conflict with prior customizations, making automatic merging unreliable; manual re-implementation is generally required.

Options suggested: A third‑party app (Theme Updater by Out of the Sandbox) claims to migrate many customizations, though no firsthand validation was provided.

Definitions:

  • Custom code: Manual edits in theme files (e.g., Liquid, CSS, JavaScript).
  • Theme updates: Installing newer versions of a Shopify theme with changed/added code.

Outcome & status: No official Shopify response or timeline for change. Expectation is that this behavior will persist for the foreseeable future. Recommended approach is to plan for manual re-application of code after updates or test migration tools. Discussion remains unresolved.

1

This goes towards the shopify team: when will it be finally possible to update a customized theme without „loosing“ all the previously done coding? :disappointed_face:

2

I am NOT a part of the Shopify team but it will probably always remain that way, at least for the foreseeable future.

When you update your theme, it does transfer over some basic customization’s, but if you have custom code in the theme files, often it does not.

One reason for this is with every updated version of a Shopify theme there are new features and code, which would cause your custom content to not function or display properly even if they were inserted into the files. That is why the code needs to be manually added to the updated themes files and it isn’t done automatically.

I know it can be tedious to have to do this with each update, but it probably will not change anytime soon.

There are apps like this which claim to be able to do this for most customizations, but I do not have personal experience with them: https://apps.shopify.com/theme-updater-by-out-of-the-sandbox

I hope that helps!
@biznazz101