Theme updates - Unlocking the growth potential of your Shopify storefront
Setting up with a premium Shopify theme is one of the most important moments in your ecommerce journey.
Whether it’s a new business venture or a storefront revamp, the moment your products and content combine with a theme designed and crafted by industry experts, the vision starts to come to life.
Unveiling a new storefront is a moment worthy of cracking open the champagne, it should be celebrated, however, not as a job done, but instead as a starting point.
The reason for this is simple, as your business grows, your storefront must adapt and grow along with it.
Whether it’s staying in touch with design trends or implementing the most up-to-date performance optimization tactics, a storefront needs to be capable of quickly adapting and evolving to be successful over time in the rapidly changing landscape of the ecommerce world.
Trends move quickly and if they move past you, your storefront becomes at risk of becoming stale and dated in the eyes of your customers.
To keep up, a business must be capable of identifying and acting upon these trends in order for their storefront to adapt and evolve along with the broader ecommerce world.
You might be wondering, how can it be possible for most businesses to stay in the race, without having a team of designers and developers on hand?
Well here’s the trick, with Safe as Milk theme updates, you have exactly that.
Safe as Milk theme updates and your store’s success story
When you install a Safe as Milk theme, we become part of your store’s journey, supporting you along the way through the ever-changing e-commerce landscape.
To do this, as part of your one-time theme payment, you get full access to all of our theme updates - each one acting as a brick to help you strengthen and build your business.
Our in-house team of designers, developers, and e-commerce experts keep their finger on the pulse of all things Shopify and the wider online sales industry to ensure that your business is fully equipped to succeed and deal with the competition.
Here are some of the ways that incorporating theme updates into your business plan will set you up for long-term success :
New feature releases
Storefront performance optimizations
Keeping up with Shopify
Bug fixes
Storefront review
Let’s take a closer look at each and see how exactly they help your business succeed over time!
New feature releases
We aim to delight with innovative new features frequently, while also making sure that the features we deliver are practical and beneficial - not just frills.
Let’s take a look at Venue as an example, a glance at the theme feature page quickly shows the extensive amount of features available :
We also constantly improve on our exisiting features, never allowing them to become outdated.
You can find this list on the Venue demo page just click on Theme Features in the navigation bar.
When Venue was first released, the feature list was not nearly this long, instead, we steadily built it up over time by adding new features through theme updates.
The features that we add to our themes are carefully selected and developed to ensure that they provide our customers with an opportunity to increase sales and grow their business with them.
While we carry out our own research to find out what the most in-demand features are, we also listen closely to you, our theme customers, and often action new features based on requests.
You are the true experts in what your business storefront needs after all!
If you have a suggestion, we’d love to hear from you through our contact page.
Storefront performance optimizations
Want to know the best way to ruin your customer’s day? Make them use a website that just doesn’t perform the way it should.
Over time, a lack of maintenance leads to a website that is just chugging along, customers will quickly identify it as laborious to use and outdated.
And that, leads to this :
Luckily, we can help prevent that from being your customer with a hefty laptop repair bill.
This is where our performance optimizations come into play.
Using the most up-to-date tools and techniques, your customer’s experience of visiting your store will be a breeze - keeping them on board all the way to the checkout.
Sometimes this will mean a complete overhaul of the code to implement the most cutting-edge optimization techniques, other times it will be a boost to accessibility, making sure that all of your customers have an equally pleasant experience on your website.
Running an online store is difficult enough, let us take care of the nitty gritty stuff that goes on in the background, so you can focus on being the entrepreneur making things happen.
Keeping up with Shopify
Shopify has got a task, and it’s a big one.
That task is to even the playing field between the hustling everyday entrepreneur and the monstrously large ecommerce corporations of the world, you know, the ones with fleets of delivery drivers going without a toilet break and billionaire CEO’s playing spaceships.
…I’m glad my name didn’t get picked out of the hat for that one.
The good news is that Shopify is making this happen and the only superpower they need is an unrelenting commitment to empowering entrepreneurs with the tools needed to compete with the big players in the retail business world.
Shopify proved this commitment last year by making plans to hire a staggering 2000 engineers:
Did you know? We’re looking for over 2,000+ data scientists and engineers worldwide to join our mission to make commerce better for everyone.
— Shopify (@Shopify) June 21, 2021
There is one certainty when you get this many brilliant minds working on a project, and that is lots of platform updates.
These updates often impact your storefront directly, however for them to work, the theme needs to be adapted for it, often times these lead to huge theme updates, which we commit to getting to you as soon as new Shopify features come available.
Here are a few of the more recent ones that were delivered through theme updates :
Online Store 2.0: There were whispers about this update long before its release, it was rumored to be a redefining moment for the Shopify platform and all its merchants.
The hype was real.
Released in June of 2021, Online Store 2.0 offered a complete rebuild of the online store feature, allowing merchants the flexibility and functionalities to fully express their business through the online storefront.
The highlight of course was “Sections everywhere” meaning that theme sections would be available for use on every page of the storefront, not just the homepage.
This means you can tell your companies story with beautiful pages like this:
And make your store easier to navigate with a long sought after sub-collections capability :
The second Online Store 2.0 dropped, we put our heads down and got working on delivering it to our customers through a theme update and I’m glad to say that Safe as Milk theme customers were some of the first to have Online Store 2.0 available to them.
What we covered here only scratches the surface of what became available with the release of Online Store 2.0, for the full low down, check out Shopify’s blog post :
Shopify Blog - Introducing Online Store 2.0
Shopify Markets: This update offers merchants a key to unlock global markets.
Breaking into a new market used to take months if not years of preparation and research, it can now all be done from within your Shopify account.
Of course, we provided a theme update for you to enable these capabilities on your storefront.
Shopify blog - Global ecommerce: Sell internationally with Shopify Markets
Shop Pay: Customers love an easier way to spend their money and the faster the better.
This update introduced “buy now pay later“ options along with an unrivaled accelerated checkout experience.
Getting these functions over to the storefront again required a theme update which we delivered to all Safe as Milk customers in record time so they could start boosting their sales right away.
Shopify blog - Shop Pay: The fasted accelerated checkout on the internet
Bug fixes
Before each update, our team goes into testing mode, making sure that everything runs smoothly and works correctly, however as with any complex technology, a bug or two is bound to slip in every now and again!
Theme bugs are a rare species and are generally quite harmless but if left unattended, things can get nasty.
Luckily, when they do slip in, they quickly meet the end of our development team’s sweeping brush and are shooed away with another update before any damage can be caused!
Storefront review
Every Shopify store has a lot of moving parts and settings that will be uniquely configured on each store, once you add apps and custom code to the mix, it’s safe to say that no two stores will ever be the exact same.
This huge amount of flexibility does however come at a cost, theme updates in most cases, are not automatic (at least not yet.)
Unless you’ve made zero changes that affect the theme code, which is unlikely, your update will arrive as a brand new blank version in your theme library.
When it arrives, it will be in need of a little extra TLC to get it up and running, essentially the work involves copying over your current theme settings and configurations to your new theme.
I know, I know, this…sounds…borning!
I get it, reconfiguring your theme every time your theme developer gets a bright idea for a theme update sounds like it would get old pretty quickly.
But here’s the good news, while updates become available to install quite often, you don’t need to drop everything and rush to update straight away.
In fact, we don’t even recommend installing every update!
There is instead a better method that will bring huge amounts of value to your business and make sure that you reap the benefits of every update.
The method we suggest is to combine your updates with a full bi-annual storefront review.
Some time slotted away each year where you can really get to know your website, check in on what is working and what aspects might need improving and make all the necessary tweaks on the updated theme version.
Here are a few points you can add to your review checklist:
UX/UI - Check if your store is easy to navigate, are your products easily findable?
Product promotion - Perhaps it’s time to reorder the products in a collection or add a new star product to the homepage.
Content update - Double-check that existing content is still relevant and add more, this can come in the form of blogs, FAQ’s, social media posts and company news for example.
App audit - Haven’t seen results from an app since the last update? Time to remove it.
So twice per year, put the kettle on, turn the phone off, roll up your sleeves and build towards your success story through Safe as Milk theme updates!
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Ready to get started and watch your business develop through theme updates? Check out our available themes and install a free trial today.