Why are some products and variants not showing on my website?

Topic summary

Two display issues after a Shopify theme change. The storefront shows only ~8 products, while the admin indicates 18 should be listed; the timing was about two weeks post-theme change, and the cause is unclear despite searching docs.

Variants not appearing: For two ornament products (one “upload your image,” one with AI-generated designs), 5 variants were created with quantity 1 each and published, but only 1 variant is visible on the storefront hours later.

User’s suspicion: During design creation, new designs were layered over an existing ornament instead of starting from a blank base; they couldn’t find how to erase/reset to blank for each variant and worry this affected publication.

Key terms: “Theme” = the storefront template/layout; “variants” = distinct versions/options of a product.

Status: No resolution or action items yet. Open questions remain about why products/variants don’t display despite appearing in admin, and how to correctly create separate variants from a blank base for each design.

Summarized with AI on January 14. AI used: gpt-5.

Here is my problems and I don’t know if they are connected or not, probably not, and I’m sure I made a mistake somewhere. Number one, A while back I changed the theme, and I think that is when this happened but not sure. About two weeks after said theme change, I realized that I was only showing about 8 products, even though on my admin page it was still showing that 18 should be listed. I have read everything I could find, but I did not find this problem, what could it be?

Mumber two, yesterday I went through and listed two styles of ornament, on one it was a upload your image, the other was designs I made with the AI generator. I had made a total of 5 variants, with only one quantity. I saved all my designs, and then published all of them as variants. A couple hours later, I noticed that only one variant was posted. Why didn’t the other 4 post? I do have an idea on that, when doing the designs, I did not use a blank ornament for each desing, I just added the new desing over the existing, I did that because I could not figure out how to erase the old design, or start with a fresh blank. I figure both are simple fixes, but I’m starting to get a headache from trying to learn. Somebody please keep me from the migrain that is coming…