7 Free Shopify Themes Every Developer Should Know: Open-Source, Flexible, and Fast

Shopify, the e-commerce giant, offers a vast array of themes to cater to various store owners' needs. However, with the majority of these themes being premium and costly, finding free alternatives can be a challenge.

In this article, we'll delve into the world of free Shopify themes, exploring their benefits for developers and providing a glimpse into how they can be utilized.

Free Shopify themes offer a viable alternative to premium themes, allowing developers and store owners to create functional stores without incurring significant costs.

While they may lack the advanced features of their premium counterparts, free themes can still be customized to suit a store's specific needs.

Why Few Free Shopify Themes Exist

At Neoxero.com and Medevel.com, we’ve developed several Shopify themes for our customers over the years. Despite this experience, we’re still amazed by the lack of free and open-source themes available for everyday users.

The limited options hinder accessibility and customization for smaller merchants.

The scarcity of free Shopify themes can be attributed to several factors. Firstly, Shopify's primary revenue stream comes from its premium themes and services, such as Shopify Plus and Shopify Payments.

By offering limited free theme options, Shopify can emphasize its premium offerings and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

Mastering Shopify Theme Development with TailwindCSS and Liquid: A Practical Guide

Investing in Shopify theme development can be a lucrative business opportunity. The Shopify Theme Store and marketplaces like ThemeForest feature numerous commercial themes that have been sold thousands of times, indicating a strong demand for quality themes. For instance, ThemeForest hosts a variety of Shopify themes that have achieved significant

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Furthermore, free themes may attract users to Shopify's platform, increasing the chances of these users upgrading to premium plans.

As pointed out by Medevel in their article "Shopify's Closed Doors" the lack of free Shopify themes has led to a significant revenue gap for the company.

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This exclusivity can be seen as a double-edged sword, providing developers with an opportunity to create innovative and functional stores without financial constraints.

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Benefits of open-source Shopify Themes for Developers

Free Shopify themes provide numerous benefits for developers, including:

• Opportunities to practice and hone their development skills
• Access to open-source code for study and modification
• Ability to create custom stores without financial constraints
• Potential to upgrade to premium themes and services in the future

By exploring free Shopify themes, developers can gain valuable insights into Shopify's platform and create functional stores that meet specific needs.

This strategic utilize of free themes can help developers build a strong portfolio, increasing their chances of securing premium work and furthering their careers in the e-commerce industry.

Free and Open-source Shopify Themes

1- Shopify Theme Lab 

Shopify Theme Lab is a customizable modular development environment for blazing-fast Shopify theme creation. It is built on top of the Shopify CLI and extends it with additional workflow and building capabilities.

By default, it's bundled with Vue.js and Tailwind CSS, but you can swap them for pretty much anything.

2- Shopify CLI for themes

The Shopify CLI is a command-line tool designed to simplify theme development. It allows you to create, customize, and manage themes directly from your terminal.

With features like local development, theme previews, and streamlined deployment, Shopify CLI enhances your workflow efficiency.

Features

• Safely preview, test, and share changes to themes using development themes
• Hot reload CSS and section changes, or automatically refresh a page on file change, when previewing a theme
• Initialize a new theme using Dawn as a starting point
• Push and publish themes from the command line
• Work on multiple themes using environments
• Check your theme code: Run Theme Check on your theme

3- KS BootShop - Shopify Theme

A Robust and Accessible Bootstrap-powered Solution

This free Shopify theme is built on the popular Bootstrap framework (v5) and developed with respect for Shopify's guidelines, accessibility best practices, and our own extensive experience creating high-quality themes over 15 years. The aim is to create a comprehensive, robust, and awesome Shopify theme that meets the needs of modern online stores.

By leveraging this free Bootstrap-powered solution, developers can create custom Shopify stores with ease, while benefiting from our expertise and commitment to delivering exceptional theme development.

Features

• Advanced styling for each section (New)
• Powered by Bootstrap framework (v5)
• Developed respecting Shopify themes requirements
• All elements are fully accessible with aria attributes
• No Javascript framework dependencies (e.g. jQuery)
• Support for native image lazy-loading
• PageSeed score 96/100 check results
• All Shopify required homepage sections (~20)
• All Shopify templates (cart, product, etc.) have their corresponding settings
• Product layout option grid or list
• Ajax add to cart

Included Sections

• Announcement bar
• Card slider/list
• Contact form
• FAQ
• Featured collections
• Featured Products
• Hero carousel
• HTML
• Media with text
• Newsletter
• Richtext
• Separator
• Testimonials

4- 🛍 Bootstrap Shopify Theme

This is a free Bootstrap Shopify Theme, built with BEM, Liquid, Sass, ESNext, and Webpack, for creating a responsive user interface.

It is an ideal choice for developers who wanna use Bootstrap for building responsive Shopify themes.

GitHub - VienDinhCom/bootstrap-shopify-theme: 🛍 A free Shopify Theme built with Bootstrap, BEM, Liquid, Sass, ESNext, Theme Tools, ... and Webpack.

🛍 A free Shopify Theme built with Bootstrap, BEM, Liquid, Sass, ESNext, Theme Tools, ... and Webpack. - VienDinhCom/bootstrap-shopify-theme

GitHubVienDinhCom

5- Dawn (Your Starter Theme)

Dawn is Shopify's first open-source theme built with a performance-first, HTML-centric approach. It features minimal JavaScript, leverages Online Store 2.0, and offers flexibility, reliability, and speed serving as a model for modern Shopify theme development.

Benefits for Developers: Dawn gives developers a clean, well-structured foundation to build themes. Its "web-native" philosophy means leveraging modern browser capabilities while maintaining compatibility through progressive enhancement.

The minimal JavaScript ensures faster loading times and easier maintenance.

With its focus on server-rendered HTML and purposeful design, developers can create lean, functional themes without unnecessary complexity.

6- Blank Shopify Theme

Blank Shopify Theme represents a completely blank Shopify Theme Architecture for custom builds.  It is ideal for developers who wanna build unique fast and responsive shopify themes.

GitHub - devwhodevs/blank-shopify-theme: Blank Shopify Theme represents a completely blank Shopify Theme Architecture for custom builds.

Blank Shopify Theme represents a completely blank Shopify Theme Architecture for custom builds. - devwhodevs/blank-shopify-theme

GitHubdevwhodevs

7- Custom Shopify Theme for CNCF Merchandise Store

This custom Shopify theme for the CNCF Merchandise Store is built on Dawn, offering performance, flexibility, and modern design. Updates are seamlessly pulled and deployed to ensure the store stays up-to-date.

GitHub - cncf/shopify-theme: 👕 Custom Shopify Theme for the CNCF Merchandise Store

👕 Custom Shopify Theme for the CNCF Merchandise Store - cncf/shopify-theme

GitHubcncf

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