Best Free Shopify Themes? I ranked EVERY free Shopify Theme in 2021

hi guys today i want to make a video ranking all of shopify's free themes available from their online theme store i get asked a lot which themes i recommend for beginners to shopify and i wanted to make this video as sort of a comprehensive guide to choosing a theme and then also give my reviews of all the different free themes that are available through shopify right now all right so the first thing i'm going to be reviewing guys is the express theme so if we go ahead and um you know we can go on shopify's themes and we look at this express theme the first thing that you guys want to be doing when you're looking at themes is you definitely want to read these features here shopify has a vested interest in you picking the correct theme for your site if you don't pick the correct theme for your site you're gonna have a bad experience your site won't perform as well as it could and uh ultimately like shopify you're gonna stop running a shopify site and shopify is not gonna get paid so they put a lot of effort into uh making sure that they that these uh are relevant to the theme and really uh inform you about what's going on with the theme so yeah with express uh you know my in my experience definitely this is definitely the case it's definitely optimized around one page stores some it used to not even have support for menus like it didn't even have a header uh menu bar like it didn't even have support for that uh now it does have support for that but you can still definitely tell that with this theme it's really focused on one page stores you know they say mobile first design generally all the themes you find on shopify are going to have very good mobile experiences because uh you know in my experience around 50 of your your web traffic is going to be mobile so it's at least as important if not more important to design for mobile um now we have this quick buy this basically so one of the little quirks with this theme is a lot of themes they'll have a dedicated cart page uh this theme does not have a dedicated cart page uh and you'll see this later um this slide out card there's a lot of themes have that built for small catalogs yeah there's another thing it's like you don't want like if your site has tons of like let's say you run a i don't know closed store or something you have just tons and tons of products right this is not going to be a great theme for you because it's very small catalogs or it's optimized around having extremely tiny catalogs right uh and finally uh future collections on homepage i mean that's like every theme so i don't even know why they put that there um if we go to the reviews tab here we can see that 30 of the people that use this theme uh find it positive as you'll see that's that's sort of on the lower end for these themes um if we go and and we can go ahead and view it view the demo store um you can see it has you know has this banner up here this alert a lot of themes have that you can see no menu no menu up here that's what i want you guys to to remember this theme is designed around one-page stores um you can see they have like sort of this grocery store or this this i think is yeah so this is like probably like a take out restaurant or something like that um where you know you can go and order this this stuff and then get it delivered to you or maybe you come and pick it out or pick it up or whatever but you know one thing i want you guys to know is like you'll see so if i click on this right it doesn't even take me to a product page right it literally opens up and you know it has a very small description right um so like if you're if you're like let's say you run like you know um you sell like a bunch of like tech gadgets or whatever that have tons of specifications and you need videos and all this like extra information to really sell the product um this is not gonna be the theme for for you uh so one of the cool things about this theme though um it's not in this version it's in the other style so if we go to the pantry style generally the styles of themes are you know they're a little bit different or whatever but generally they're pretty similar this actually has like an add to cart button straight on the um on the thing here so i can literally click on on this and be like yeah i want to get a watermelon i want to get you know two three four that you know who knows how many watermelons i want but the whole point is that um basically like right from this page i can add things to my cart which is not the case with all the shopify themes but once again um very limited in you know same sort of pro pop-up with the product or whatever very limited as far as that goes so let's go back to uh the bistro style um is there anything else i want to point out here most of the stuff it's it's pretty standard um so let's get into uh if we go to um if we go to my test store let me go ahead and and show uh just a complete um so we have express here right and i believe this is the i forget which uh which is which but yes this is the pantry one um one of the things i want to do in this video guys is i want to show you all the different sections that you can add for these themes because i find you know if i'm coding a site or whatever and it doesn't have a certain section and then i'm going to be like okay i have to add that section is it worth the time when i could just go and pick another theme that actually has that section so um so here's the sections we have custom content this is pretty standard with like every theme um custom content you can just you know like put some text you can add an image there's other blocks like text image products collections this is standard with all the different themes um some other we got a page so you can insert like a page on your um on your like site so like i could literally select let's see like my return to monkey page or whatever and uh you know it just basically this is literally the page like i just have the title and i have a description and it'll just put it in there it's kind of a throwaway feature to be honest like i don't know when you'd really want to i mean i guess like if you you know you might want to put some like branding of it like some description about your brand so you might be like okay like this is my brand like this is some stuff about my brand but generally that stuff like we what you guys should understand is people don't people generally like they scan sites more than read them so like this stuff works much better with that right um the like you saw it on there on their preview yeah on their preview so you can see like when they're talking about their brand they're literally like handmade daily family tradition right like and people can just scan through this and they get a feel for the brand rather than having to read some massive text thing um continuing on uh basically uh we have page featured collection that's like every site that's just um this if we go back to the preview that featured collections thing is just this here so they have their fresh meals their pasta all this sort of stuff um yeah so that's that uh let's see what else banner that's probably the top the top or that's that that's like this top thing so you could you know i can select an image i could go to like free images and hit like um you know whatever like i don't know like this um and then we go to like the banner and we can say like uh fresh like freshly picked or something you know and um give some sort of description like we freshly pick all our products um we could also have a button here so we can be like shop now you know um button link goes to you know um all products or something and uh you know generally um yeah that's that's just sort of how this is gonna work you can you can customize all these different things um that's the banner image with text that's pretty standard um you know i'm not gonna really go through that because it's it's super standard multi-column um this is you know you can once again it's just for branding stuff the more that i poke around with this like what i would tell you is basically um with express uh i think it would work with a very specific sort of site right i think the two um the two examples that they give in the demo is like it's basically be constricted to those types of sites it would work with like a takeout restaurant right or a delivery restaurant type restaurant um or like you have like you know if if you ran like a grocery store or whatever um you know that that was very simple like didn't have huge inventory or anything like that uh you know i consider using this theme other than that though um you know if you have if you want to do any sort of content marketing on your site like having a blog or like posting videos or anything like that this is going to really this this theme is really going to constrain you um and so with you know for that reason uh let's first of all i want to get rid of this d uh row because generally uh shopify like all the themes are like decent they're not they're not going to be a d like i'm not going to give any of these themes a failing grade but this theme i would definitely rank as a c tier uh just because it's so it's um it's not very versatile um the number of uh of sections that you can add are pretty limited um it doesn't really have much uh that is really um unique to it um other than the um which i pointed out earlier this add to cart like from this page or whatever that's kind of unique in being able to you know um add you know more than one item or whatever that's kind of unique so uh so yeah so so that's express guys okay so next thing we're gonna do is boundless i kind of have a uh a love hate relationship with boundless i actually made a video about how to make boundless menus better um to be honest with you like their menus are not my favorite um they can work for certain things one of the things they show in the demo is basically um this is great like great for a clothing store and yeah i'd have to agree with them you can see their menu like doesn't it doesn't have a drop down like there's no ability to have a drop down right which is kind of limiting and annoying in my opinion um we have uh you can see basically the way balance works or at least this theme on boundless works is like instead of the traditional um product image and then uh like the little description or the the cost or whatever it just has that like pops up as a sort of an overlay over the products when you hover over them which is kind of nice i mean it's a nice feel to it like it feels like a very modern uh sort of chic site um we have uh you know they say it's optimized for large images that's uh you know that's what we're just looking at like yeah like it's gonna literally maximize the amount of space to showcase your products um there's a slideshow with fading effect that's you know a lot of the themes have that once again sticky navigation this is um you know basically it means like when you uh scroll down the page uh basically the menu bar comes with you the single product gallery so if we go and check out one of their products um you can see that like the product images are going to be massive for this so this is like i would say for boundless like if you have extremely good product images and you don't want to mess around with product copy as much like you basically just want to rely upon like i don't know maybe you're a photographer or something and like maybe you're literally showcasing the actual images you're selling this might be a great uh theme for that um or if your your product images speak for themselves and you don't need that much product copy to go along with them uh you might consider this theme as well to me i think that this works you know with the clothing it would work if you're like an artist and you're trying to sell your art anything where your product is extremely impressive visually it might work and there's not much to say about it right um but other than that like if you once again if we go back to the example if you're selling like gadgets or whatever this would be a terrible choice right because the gadget itself maybe it's visually impressive but now you need to like add all of this um all this description to it and you literally don't have the space to do that because there's these massive images and you can't showcase that on your homepage or anything like that um full width collection is so this just image image image uh home page video so a lot of i mean a lot of themes have the option to add you know embed a video into the home page um let's see if they have an example of that because it'd be cool if they had something where it like auto played or like something like that but um yeah i don't know if they're gonna have it so let's go to the other style so let's go to vibrant uh vibrant yeah you can see the layouts a little bit different here same same sort of thing with the products where we're hovering over it and and um you know we get the the price and whatnot but not before yeah they don't have any uh whatever's they don't have any examples of it with uh the video once again it's gonna be the same menu where there's no drop down which is atrocious i i made you know in that video that i was talking about it's sort of like a pseudo drop down that i made you can click on these and then it'll take you like if you have sub menus stacked in here it'll it'll create another menu that has those sub menus um and then if you you know navigate out of that it'll go back to the previous menu so if you do use this theme you might consider checking out that video that i made all right we'll go ahead and customize this check out what what sections it has so you can see it has it has more sections than express um custom html this is a really nice section like if you if you need something that's super um you know really custom done and stuff you're not going to use a custom html section like this but if you just need like some you know something simple like a simple sort of widget on your site that can be done with custom html um it's always good to have this sort of a custom html uh section here uh blog posts this is just gonna be like a list of your blog posts a lot of the themes have this basically it's just gonna have the blog post title and then a description of it um what else do we got collection list you can see the collection list very standard um featured collection we have um that's just like what we had you know back here with um basically like these uh or if we look at this demo you can see this this will be like a featured collection here it's just a bunch of products um then we have uh image with text very standard image side by side with text moving on featured product this is also standard it'll just have the product description and then an image um newsletter this is you know i don't think i saw that on the last theme this is um having an a subscribe to the newsletter with a like a good call to action a reason to subscribe to your newsletter uh you know i think it's a it's a great thing to have on your homepage just because you can pick up you know some emails here and there and whatnot and it's like you're never gonna say no to emails like that um it's got a map a lot of them this is pretty standard for a lot of the shopify themes um this will just you know you can add in like if i add in the an address here it'll it'll show it on google maps and then you can add like this is our store's address these are our hours and whatnot um yeah it's very standard rich text here we have uh something where you can talk about the brand i mean this is like yeah there's not really reason to really talk about this much um it's just you know it's it's uh pretty standard a lot of themes have this and then we have a video yeah this is the video i was talking about guys this better boundless menus without coding so i can link that here actually um yeah so like basically it's just gonna embed a youtube video on your site which is like it'd be cool if it autoplayed it or something like that but it's just embedding a video so it's i mean it's all right all right guys so really quickly if we just want to wrap this up with uh boundless uh you can see that as far as the user reviews go it gets a 45 positive uh review rating with 29 reviews it's a little bit more versatile than express obviously um it's a little bit cleaner looking and a little bit nicer and definitely if you have really good product images i would i would consider using it um as long as your products don't need uh super detailed descriptions about what they are um but yeah overall i would give it like a b um it's not like you'll see some of the themes as we go on i think are much more versatile and uh speaking of which let's let's move on to the uh the brooklyn theme so brooklyn i think is like honestly so the theme so far i'm like you know i'm very uh i i'll sleep on them like that brooklyn i would not sleep on like it's it's a really good uh theme um they say it's made for modern apparel stores uh i found you can use it with a lot of different types of sites it's not just for uh clothing stuff it can really be used with a lot of different types of sites so um so if we look at uh brooklyn um you know they say it's designed for modern apparel stores it has a header slideshow um dynamic product grid you'll see this dynamic product grid is pretty cool um the rest of this i mean this is basically like a lot of shopify themes have this their slide out card is kind of nice on this theme as well too uh homepage video you know that's just once again you're just embedding a youtube video which is like i don't know why that's even a it's like a thing 70 positive reviews with 84 reviews that's the other thing is you can see with the reviews here like 84 people have reviewed this so you can tell more people are using this probably than the other theme um you got the 70 positive generally people like this theme um i would say like this uh not to spoil things but this debut um simple adventure i think and minimal to a certain extent get to get the most use from people um if we continue on uh let's just like view the demo store for this so you can see it has like the big takeaways that i want you guys to realize with this is like so it has this transparent menu that's sort of it's it's hallmark is this transparent menu um it has this huge uh you know it's great for this huge slideshow you it has these two you know you can switch the slideshow down here or you can do here or you can also make it you know automatically switch like you'd expect with a site like this um this is the big thing with uh with brooklyn is like basically it it kind of dynamically adjusts the size of the like featured collections and and uh products i think um so you can see that most sites this five would be maybe it would be five across or maybe there'd be like three here and two here but they'd all be the same size on brooklyn like it'll adjust the size to make them sort of this nice pleasing like layout like this it also um it also is very responsive right like you hover your mouse over it and um you get this like where it's uh you know it has that black overlay like half transparent black overlay and the image zooms with your products it's gonna like sort of light them up like which i think um you know anytime you have like more responsive images and stuff it's gonna encourage people to click uh what else do we have so if we want to look at the slide out cart you just hit add to cart here yeah so you can see like when when we hit add to cart here it just like this thing will come out on the side and it'll let us know like what's in our cart we can adjust the number of things yeah you can see full menu here like you could have an about page you could have all your different collections um the other thing with brooklyn that's nice is i don't know if they have it showcased here but um no they don't maybe they have it on this playful one uh yeah they do so it has a i'm not clicking here it has a hover drop down menu which is i find is like one of the more requested features for people on their sites here's one of the cool things so you can see that these products you know will automatically adjust on this playful thing um yeah which which is really cool like i like the layout here how it has like this large product and then two smaller ones and then the two small and then the large i think it just looks like really nice um and just breaks things up if we look at all the different sections we can add we have custom html blog posts collection list feature collection so there's nothing really out of the ordinary um i do want to show you guys the um feature collection i guess uh all right i wanna show you the uh collection list because like basically so you can see here if we have seven collections it's gonna organize them like this as opposed to usually most shopify themes it would just be like a grid um if we get rid of two of these collections you can see it'll you know at six it it's just a grid at five it goes into this um you know three and it i think is just regular like it doesn't yeah it doesn't do anything i i wish they give you like a little bit of control over this um so maybe you could have like two small ones one big one two small you know like that would be uh that'd be optimal i think the other thing to realize about this theme is basically like they're um this this pop-out cart actually functions as your cart i believe so there's no dedicated car page i don't think um you just go straight from here to the checkout uh all the checkouts for for all the themes are like the same you know the only thing that really differs is like the default colors that they have or whatever but you can change those anyways you see the product page it's like it has sort of all the different pictures and they're stacked on top of each other i think it looks really nice with this example that they've given the other thing is you can see the um the uh description here is moving down with the text right which is not doesn't happen on every theme yeah so overall guys like i really like this theme i really like brooklyn honestly um i think it's one of the better themes you can choose i'm gonna put it as an s uh it's it's you know it has positive ratings it has like a decent number of features and whatnot and i think you know they say it's for an apparel store but really i think you could use it for like almost any store um it's just overall a good theme once you get into like using a theme you can add certain customizations to it if you know how to code or you hire someone to code and you could really take brooklyn from being like you know a fairly good base starting theme to like really being like a very um usable and functional and uh clean like enterprise theme all right guys so i'm back from lunch and the next theme i want to rank is the debut theme so debut is one of the most popular themes on the shopify theme store um if we just start out with the reviews it has 88 reviews 50 of which are positive um it's kind of in my mind it's like the most standard i think it's the default theme uh it might still be i know it at one time it was at least the default theme that shopify starts off sites with um they're switching that i think to the dawn theme which isn't on this list it's it's um uh basically it's it's like an online store 2.0 exclusive theme um i'll have more videos about that in the future but uh so basically um debut theme we can look at the features that they that they you know want to highlight in a pickup availability slideshow you know a lot of the themes have that predictive search uh that basically just means while you're um like we can look on the live demo store i mean while you're typing out whatever it's gonna start to bring up products so if i type a it you know it brings up whatever or if i type arm it's gonna still you know auto complete with these arm chairs or whatever um customer testimonials that it's kind of here's the thing about that is like it's a little bit um you're still going to want to get like a review app and whatnot so people can leave the the reviews because uh this is just like you literally have to hard code in these reviews like it doesn't add like a review system to your store whatsoever it's just you hard code in this like let's say someone left this review on facebook you could hard code you know type this in like yeah um so promotional banner um that is just the top i think that's just like the thing up here where it's like you yeah there's free shipping at any time or whatever um we got built for small catalogs yeah once again so this like the express theme you don't want a huge catalog with this it's for sites you know have you know whatever like 10 20 products or something um or even fewer homepage video once again yeah it's just an embedded video product recommendations this is just on product pages so when i click one of these you'll see um it it's recommending um underneath here it's recommending like if you like this product you might also like these products i'm decently sure that this going in and seeing the tags the product has and using those to show more products um product filtering we have so this is just for the the product search like you'll see if i go to um furniture and i click on something like sofas it'll allow me to sort by best selling alphabetically price high low date so i've used uh debut a decent amount you can see it's a very standard like ecommerce theme i think it's a really good base um for for a site uh i definitely like i would if i were to use it right and when i do use it i i really customize it a ton to make it um function in the way that i want and look look the the way that i want um but yeah it's i'd say it's you know it's a really good base uh starting for a store so basically you can see that uh you know you have this uh uh menu unfortunately it's not doesn't have a hover drop down built in uh i actually have a video on how you can add a hover drop down to uh debut and and i can link that for you guys like i'll i'll try to remember to put a card up there right now to link that for you guys um if we look at all the sections it has you can see it has a ton of sections compared to a lot of the other themes so we have the custom content this is literally just like you can add you know some text you can add images you could add a whole bunch of different things like videos you could add a product uh collection menu blog article custom html and so like debut i think um more than a lot of the other themes this custom content section is useful because you can basically build out the page in the way that you want it to appear much more easily than a lot of the other themes because there's so many different types of blocks and it also has a custom html block in the custom content block which is nice because you can literally be like okay this section here i want this to um to say you know to be whatever right i want it to be like some custom thing right and so with these uh custom content blocks like what you have to realize is like let's say i add two more images or something what you can do here is like so you could either make these like this grid sort of system or you can make them you know you can make them like 33 you can make you know if i made all of these 25 then they're all gonna be on the same uh row here so yeah this i think is like i really like that shopify includes things like this because it makes it so that um even if you can't code you can really start to delve into like really making your site appear the way you want to want it to appear so i think to me like this is like one of the best things that debut has is literally like this ability to like customize the content so much here so uh but moving on from that the blog post that's pretty standard it literally just has like you know same thing like just a grid of your blog posts it's like every other theme collection list it's going to be very similar to other themes it's responsive when you hover over it i think you know we can probably see it here so yeah so this is their collection list here on their site um you can see when we hover over it it has uh you know it has that black over semi-transparent overlay and has the titles you can click on any of these it'll take you to the collections very standard for a lot of the themes um what else do we have we have a featured collection that's literally just gonna like show a bunch of products here um you know that's uh let's see what that looks like i don't know if the yeah the trending products is gonna be a good example of that here it just has the three products you can make it i think up to like i i'm not even sure i think like five products across or something yeah uh so collections per row no wait i'm on the wrong feature collections like products per row yeah you can make it up to five products across you can make different numbers of rows you could have a show view all button right so it's it's highly customizable um what else do we have a gallery that's literally just like um let's see if they have that here uh i don't think they do have that here but gallery is kind of neat it's just like basically it's sort of like a collection list like it's sort of set up like this but you can see there's no padding in between the elements and the other thing is you can literally so you could link to anything like i could link to like blogs and then if i had a yeah like my news blog i could link there and then i can have a custom image um yeah i mean like i i like galleries um especially because like you can you can really um you can make these you know huge you can make them really small um they're they're pretty nice so um continuing on uh we have image with text that's really standard image with text overlay um yeah that's just you know the side-by-side thing and then image with text overlay is literally um sort of like it's almost like this up here um in fact no this is literally this right it's an image with text overlay and you have an optional button there um so continue on you could have a logo list this is very similar to all the stuff we've been talking about before but um basically it's gonna this is good for like something like you know so many sites now do this where they're like as featured in you know and then like they'll list all the different logos of like yeah i was featured in xyz publication right um what else do we have so we have slideshow here this is good for your landing page like up here um if you if you have more than one thing to display here i you know highly recommend using a slideshow you can obviously customize like how long it stays on each slide and what's on each slide and buttons and whatnot featured products uh you have yeah it's just standard product thing um newsletter standard newsletter sign up map standard map like all the other shopify themes um rich text this is literally just like a little blurb about your brand i'd almost never use this because i probably end up just using custom content if i was going to use that um testimonials you know this is what i was talking about like you can see though these like there's it's not like they have a review system for your store for your products it's literally like you're gonna have to go in and um and literally like type in like they like they have the best monkeys available like something like that right like you literally have to go and type in these things and then type in the author's name it'd be nicer if shopify by default had some sort of review system because you know right now you just have to um uh use a review app and uh that's that's that so um continuing on we have text columns with images this is you know it's similar like if you wanted to use the logos but then you wanted to give blurbs about them i would use this uh this text column with images this is literally just images and then there's text underneath very self-explanatory uh and then video once again this is just gonna be an embedded video yes so that's that's all the sections for this um honestly so if i'm gonna rate debut if i'm gonna rank it um debut i think for the like if it weren't for the custom um where did it go the custom content i probably give it an a but with this custom content being so many different things here i'm going to go ahead and give it an s although i won't rank it um i'll bring it behind brooklyn i really think they should just like i have the video to to do the hover drop down i mean like why don't they just have that it's not a hard feature to code in um they could easily support it uh the other thing is you know if we want to see like what all these look on like on mobile um you can see it's very you know a lot of these just look very similar on mobile um you know on mobile this is kind of annoying i i found it's like with this debut i wish like so you can see like it's like if you have three products it'll put one here one here and then one here which is like i would love if this were in the middle or if at least there was an option to to center that um yeah so same thing with this like the collections left right left like let's do left right middle or do like left right middle and then make this full screen full width right it's between an s and an a honestly um but i'll give it an s just because i've used it on a bunch of sites for for a while all right guys so the next theme that i want to review is the minimal theme so um minimal i think uh you know it's a fairly popular theme um you can see that they say it's a simple clean design that keeps the focus on your products um you know i think there's an emphasis on simple with this theme in my opinion it's a little too simple uh and we're gonna get into that a little bit as we as we look at the demo and whatnot this stuff is all pretty standard for most shopify themes um if we go to the reviews you can see there's 96 reviews there's decent number of people using it and um 82 of the reviews are positive we go ahead and view a demo store for it basically it has an alert banner up here um that has the card in the search here um we've got our header here it looks like this might be a transparent header um you can see it's just a very simplistic theme right like we've got our um sort of slideshow here uh you know your products this is just a featured collection this is like some featured uh blog posts or whatever and um this is just a featured product here so you can see it's it's fairly simplistic if we go and look at the different theme styles very similar um you know these are once again just now we have featured collections i believe this is a featured collection but you can see that it's just very simplistic this does have a hover drop down on this version of the theme one of the other things that i want you guys to note is like if you go into the reviews and and you're like you know you see their demo sites um and they're not doing it for you like like you know because obviously they're going to set up their demo sites um to look really really nice for each theme you know what you can do is if you want to see how like other people have implemented these you can look in the reviews and a lot of times people will either post their um their url will be in the title like this one this gift favs dot store here or the url will be down in the review so we're on my demo store now and i'm just gonna take a look at um all the different sections you can add to the home page so if we go ahead and customize our home page um you can see that we can add custom html it's great um i like themes that have that blog posts um collection lists featured collections gallery you know this stuff is all very standard guys i mean this is a very standard theme um honestly if you're gonna use this theme you're probably gonna have to customize it a decent amount or download these number of apps to really get a sort of unique look and feel of your site um yeah i think i would rate minimal like there's honestly there's not that much to say about this theme i don't know when i would ever use this rather than um debut or a brooklyn or or some of the other themes that we're gonna get to i really don't know when i would use this because i think it's um it's just uh very simple very versatile but i think that comes at the expense of them not making enough decisions as far as um really like sort of pinholing the theme down into being really effective at doing a thing you know it's it's just sort of a general thing and while that can be good i think it's just not as good as some of the other general themes like brooklyn or debut um so i'm gonna go ahead and and uh give it you know i think um it's between a b and an a um i would say you know i'll give it a b i i'd rate it above boundless because i'm you know not a fan of boundless menus but overall yeah i think that it's it's you know it's not my preference i know that there are a lot of people that do uh like this theme um the other thing that i was reading in some of these reviews is people are saying the theme is really slow that's another thing to keep in mind when you're choosing a theme guys is um some of these themes most of them you know if you get them from the shopify store most of them are going to be very performant but some of them some of their page speed times will be slower than others all right guys the next theme that i want to review is the narrative theme basically i find narrative works really well if you're building a store that's centered around a single product right or you know a single product that has multiple variants right um and you'll see like as we go into the demo stores and we start to look at the sections and whatnot you'll see what i'm talking about so you know they say it's built for small catalogs this hero video um you know basically that it has a really nice uh section on the home page where you can put a full screen video that theoretically should auto play depending on your your visitors browser slash whether they're using an ad blocker or not a lot of themes they have the option to embed videos but they don't have uh the big like impressive full screen uh experience on on a desktop uh you know they say design for visual storytelling yeah that's the name narrative um fixed navigation that's just referring to this like instead of having a menu bar it just has this hamburger and you'll see as we get into looking at the demo site we'll see that more vertical slideshow you know that's better shown than said so we'll just wait until we get into the demo to show that and then the wide layout basically this this theme looks really good on on desktops this theme more than a lot of the other themes uh free themes on shopify makes use of you know having that huge width on a desktop so if we get into looking at some of the demo stores you can see this is just their earthy theme style so you can see it basically has uh you know it's pretty standard for a lot of themes they just have a sort of a an image a huge image and then they have you know the title and a button or whatever uh that's pretty standard but this is what i was talking about with this this hamburger icon you know you hover over it uh gives you a little animation you click that it opens up and you can see now we have our menu here right so if you want a um you know across the screen menu this is not the theme for you um but if you're fine with having this you know transparent uh header with um with the hamburger that's good and the other thing to note is this is like a semi semi-sticky header because basically when you're scrolling down it's not there as soon as you scroll back up we can access the menu again so anyway so if we go down here you know this is just image with text that's really standard uh this is this full screen video that i was talking about before it's just some text uh this is a gallery here um i'm sure i'm sure these have the option where you could you could link something here right now they don't have anything linked on these images but you probably could link something here um this you can see this is this vertical slideshow that that um you know it's talking about here where basically you scroll down and the right side of the the screen is scrolling the left side seems to say the same this is really great you can showcase all the different variants of your your product um you know that's one of the reasons this is such a great uh theme for for a single product store um so what else do we have a featured product here if if we go and look at the other thing i wanted to show you guys really quickly is if we look at one of these product pages you can see so it has this image here when we hover over it it'll zoom into the image you know title buttons standard stuff we have the description and then um you know if we add this to cart let's see what happens it has a cyborg cart uh i don't think it has a dedicated cart page it has this sidebar cart um you can see that down here if you have really good product images you might consider using this theme just because the product images are uh really showcased with this theme the other thing that this theme you know this theme supports uh having like sort of 3d models it'll take a while to load and depending on what browser or the speed of your computer or whatnot um you know just it it will so i've just zoomed in like a ton but you can see that basically i'm sort of dragging clicking and dragging this and it's rotating the stroller so it's giving me you know like you can really bring your product to life if you have this 3d model um for your customer so you can see that this is like a video that i've clicked on if we go check out the other theme styles you can see they're very similar the only difference is um this this sort of uh you know this is like one of these slide shows but the way they have it set up is basically such that like these down here are the different slides so you can click this and this view more button will pop up and um you know we go to the other slide when we click these so um so that's kind of neat because that's pretty unique to this theme uh you can see that there's those css transitions on some of the um like decoration here where this like wasn't there and then i scrolled down and it sort of uh grew out of out of nowhere um it has a review carousel which basically you're still gonna have to enter the reviews you're still gonna have to type them in yourself um but you know it'll do this thing where it's it like is fading them in and out uh it's kind of nice you can see that that another css transition there um this is just a vertical slideshow yeah so this is that's everything on this theme um you know the different themes are very for all the different theme styles for all the shopify themes they're all very similar um you can just see the different like things that they've done with these types of sites um and i think that's useful for you guys to see is just like see what they've like for instance this is theme style specifically i think with the product that they have it lined up with and everything i think you know i could see this site converting very well um yeah so so yeah so i think that narrative is basically really good for um single product sites like if you're just selling a single product and you really want to make a landing page for that that product and and like really explain a ton about the brand and the product and whatnot and then have a call to action at the bottom um you know i think it's great it's a great option for that if you're looking at doing like content marketing and like really getting into building out your site like to a huge degree and like uh you want to have a huge catalog i wouldn't recommend narrative so we're on my test site and we're going to take a look at all the different sections you can add to the home page mostly sections for most shopify themes are pretty similar um you know you can see here that we have the different slides right that we can like i was showcasing before with the warm theme um you can see uh you know we can make custom content that's pretty standard for a lot of the theme you can literally kind of customize the layout of the the um section really well uh i find that's really useful so if you guys haven't given that a try with your themes i would definitely give that a try with the testimonials we're still gonna have to type these it's not like it adds review functionality to the website um let's see with the header if we can make it non-transparent i think we can right so we can click this yeah and it becomes non-transparent if we click that um you know we can we can change the the uh the color of the icons and whatnot um you know we can show an announcement that's pretty standard we could show our social icons right now i don't have those set up so they're not going to show but you know they'd probably be here or something you know i would say basically with narrative if i'm going to rank it i'd say you know i'm going to give it an s because it's the only theme so far that we've really seen that would work extremely well for a single product site but other than that you know it's not as versatile obviously as like brooklyn or debut but because they pinholed it down to doing one thing i think it really does that one thing well so i'm going to give it an s but i'll rank it behind brooklyn and debut all right guys so the next theme that i want to review is the simple theme so there's two big features that simple has that not a lot of other shopify themes have so with simple uh you know it stays true to its name it's a very simple theme you know we can go ahead and look at the demo right here uh you know one thing to note is you saw those products um sort of bubble up the page or whatever that's like an animation uh that that they have coded into uh your product uh your your featured product section um you can see so that's that's one thing that's different about this theme the other thing that is sort of unique to this theme is it has a sidebar menu so you can see um right across the side here on all these different theme styles there's several options for different uh categories for your collections for your products these can be anything really this is just serves as your menu most of the themes will have the menu across the top this has the menu on the side if we want to go ahead and look at a product page you can see this is you know super simple product page you have the the image the title some add to cart buttons along with some selectors you can select the different product images here and then you have a description and then you have the recommended products at the bottom of the screen so if we look at the reviews you can see that there's you know 29 reviews so there's not as many people that use this theme but of the people that do use it you know 86 percent rate it positively um ultimately like you know my um we're gonna get into like the sections and whatnot on my test site but my feeling about simple is i think that it's um you know none of these themes are are bad obviously but to me simple i think is a little bit too simple and i can't really see uh i would never recommend this theme to someone over you know another theme like i think if you were gonna do a clothes shop like this you'd honestly be better off going with like brooklyn for sure um you know maybe even boundless over this to be quite honest with you there's not much opportunity to do any sort of branding or any sort of you know telling your story about your brand or anything like that all right so here we are on my test site and so let's go ahead and see what sections we can add to the home page on simple so you can see there's not as many sections on this theme as a lot of the other themes we still have our custom html which is great um you know we could add a blog posts this just very standard for shopify let's see what else collection lists featured collections featured banner image with text let me see if there's anything i particularly want to point out um the embedded video it's not a full screen thing it's just a you know just um bound to the uh where all the other sections are bound to for the header we can't add any sort of menu here um for the sidebar let's see what sorts of options there are there nothing so it's just yeah it's just the menu yeah overall i would say simple like honestly i'm gonna give it um i'm gonna give it a b i mean like i think that it's you know it's pretty versatile like you could use it for a lot of different types of stores i don't know why you'd really want to use it for any of your stores though because the name says it all right it's so simple right uh and there's not really much um you know i don't think you could really do that much with it i wouldn't choose this theme really for anything um but that's you know that's just my own opinion um if you guys you know disagree with me like let me know in the comment section below perhaps you have a great you know a great website uh i'd love to see an example of a site that's like a really good site that uses simple so the next theme i want to do is the supply theme so supply you can see it says it's built for large catalogs and this is the first um theme we've checked out that says that uh collection filtering and sidebar slideshow feature collections on home page all right so this one seems to be they're pitching it is basically that it's huge um really good for large catalogs so yeah so you can see this this site for instance sells um you know it sells uh cameras and all the camera equipment and all this stuff right so um yeah you can see that it has a lot of options as far as like when we come to the home page it has this slideshow here but then we also have like all these collections uh we have like this this section that features all these collections uh we have a featured collection itself uh this is another future collection i believe um you know this sort of looks like uh yeah so if we go to best buy you can see it's sort of a similar type of thing um just like these huge collections right uh so yeah so i think something like that like if you have let's see what one of the other um what's the other thing so this is for watches and like leather so it's like a you know it's it's sort of like a apparel store to see what the the reviews say for this so it's 60 positive and 57 uh reviews uh you know i'd say like overall it's a decent looking theme you know it might be a little bit um it's a little plain uh you know it doesn't look like there's a whole lot of like animations going on or any like um i mean we'll see when we get into the sections but it doesn't look like there's a whole lot of uh things that are super unique to this theme um but you know if you do have a large catalog you might you might consider using this theme all right so let's see if we can customize this and and find any um sections that are unique to supply so um you know it looks like we have yeah so it recommends you know you have this slideshow and then a collection list and then some featured collections underneath it let's see if there's anything that doesn't show up with other uh themes the image with text i mean that's just gonna be your standard yeah image left and right with tags slideshow featured products newsletter map rich text video so yeah and this is yeah it's just an embedded video so uh it looks pretty uh standard as far as shopify themes go there's not really much um you know it does have the hover drop down which is nice um on the on the main menu uh you know if we go back to this and we like let's see how this looks like when we add a product to the card or on the product page yeah pretty standard product page um when we add to the cart our shopping cart pops up as a as a little pop-up here um so there's probably no dedicated cart page on this um on this theme honestly i think that um you know i don't know what necessarily like let's say if we go to um if we go to here what can we sort by so it just has a sort and then it has a shop by over here so this is maybe the tags um so that's that's a little unique i don't think debut has something like this where you can sort by you know where you can literally click and get the tags or whatever so yeah that's a little unique um but other than that um honestly i think that you know you'd probably be better off going with a um you'd probably be going out better off going uh debut or brooklyn um with this type of site if there's a firm reasoning why this is much better for large catalogs than either of those i'd appreciate if you leave it in this in the comment section but um you know overall i'd say this is a decent theme i'm not going to put it on the same level as these s-tier themes because i think that there's better themes up here that would accomplish the same thing it's pretty versatile um yeah i'm gonna give it an a because i think it's definitely better than uh you know things like minimal boundless simple definitely better in express but it's just not up with these top tier themes all right guys so we're in the home stretch here the final theme that i want to review today is the venture theme so venture is an interesting theme it's one of my favorite themes actually you can see this one also just like supplies built for large catalogs this one has an interesting uh drop down menu you can actually show product images straight in the menu slideshow pretty standard for most shopify themes uh promotional banner that's also the same it's just the thing across the top that's a lot of stores have that product filtering uh it's like debut where you can you can actually just choose like okay this is best selling sort products by you know uh alphabetically like there's different filters for it so if we look at reviews of this it's 46 positive um i like this theme a lot to be honest um so i'm gonna have to disagree with these reviews but um you know 67 reviews so there's a decent number of people using it it's interesting because this is like a snowboarding store in the demo you know anything about the ceo of shopify uh he actually started the first company he started was a snowboard store so i think this is sort of a throwback to uh and i think it was called snowdevil if i remember correctly yeah he launched a store called snowdevil so this is sort of a call back to that you can see that there's actual product images featured in the drop down um so this is the only free theme on shopify that has this so if you want this functionality on your site you're either going to have to hire cus coder to do it or code it yourself or use this theme now you can see this is just of some featured collections here this is a featured collection with the products it's another featured collection with products and then they have the footer now let's see the different theme styles so we have outdoors as well this is once again going to have the products in the drop down this is not a hover drop down i do have a video discussing how you can uh you know really simply with copy paste code how you can create a hover drop down and venture um you know this is a similar setup to the other one uh let's go to boxing and you know it's gonna it's probably gonna be a similar setup once again yep same sort of menu if we go to one of these products and we we add these to our cart let's see how that works yes this is going to have a dedicated cart page you can go ahead and click the dedicated car page it'll take you there and then you can check out and all the checkouts are the same for all the themes as i mentioned previously all right so we're on my test site now um let's just wait for it to load for a second and yeah we can see what sections we can add so this has a ton of sections um you know probably similar number to debut or something like that uh we got custom html blog posts collection lists future collection you can read through these um you know i'm looking if there's anything that sticks out these logo lists are pretty nice you'll see venture has this thing where it actually it doesn't grid them like most of the logo lists do um you know it'll if you have seven it'll sort of align them in this this uh centered way which is nice um what else do we have uh multiple line blocks would be akin to like a gallery in um in uh debut uh so be it'd be like a gallery and debut and these would have labels um and and links attached to them um where were we so uh then we have what else we have logo list yeah we got that slideshow um testimonials text and then the the video is not gonna be a full screen yeah it's just an embedded video um yes this is you know it's all pretty standard stuff i think the big draw here is basically um the big draw on on venture is basically having the products up here in the actual menu um and yeah because as i discussed this is the only theme that does that other than that i mean you have a sort of a modern looking site i i tend to like venture sort of geared towards like sports like a lot of uh sports stores uh sports e-commerce stores will use it um and you know i tend to agree with that just if we go to ski right we can filter by like ski boots bindings skis and then we can also sort by this so i'm pretty sure this also has like if we go to men's yeah all yeah these are all collections that we can filter by too so when it says that it supports uh large catalogs what it means is that it also has this drop down to filter by further collections once you're in a certain collection if i have to rank venture i'm gonna put it in the s tier um i think i'm gonna put it um i think i'm gonna put it uh let's see i mean it's i think it's you know it's it's obviously more versatile than narrative um i put it up here um i might put it in front of debut actually to be to be honest with you um although yeah i don't know i mean these themes like the thing is also with these themes is the more used a theme is um the more you're gonna find like custom coding tutorials for it the more you're gonna find um people that have made forum posts about it for support issues that you're gonna have so that's also something to keep in mind guys like these top three themes that i've had uh that i've listed here um you know they're they're good and uh you know people recognize that and there's a whole lot of people using them right now so um you're going to find it really easy to get support for these themes um so yeah so the final the final verdict is basically you have these top these are my four favorite themes uh if you remember this was basically either a clothing store or you know it can be used for more general stuff uh debuts was just general stuff venture we said was like sports although i think you could probably do like more general stuff with it too narrative was like if you have a a certain a specific product right or you know a product and has multiple variants but it's all the same products and you want just basically a really killer landing page for that product supply was for large catalog it would work well for like if you had a bunch of gadgets you were selling or whatever um minimal uh i said uh that it was sort of a general thing is a little simple though boundless you know i i said the menus are annoying so i wouldn't mess with it but you know if you if you want to go ahead simple i just said forget about it um and express i said in the the only case is like basically they had very two niche very like very niche cases that i don't think a lot of people run into if i had to give some general advice about choosing a theme guys you know i i would sort of if i were you i'd go through anytime you're looking at a theme i would go through you know what i did like you look at the demo you look at the reviews um you know look at what people are saying about it online and then realize that like the theme you choose you're probably going to end up customizing it in a lot of ways anyways and so don't worry about choosing one of these themes like debut there's a ton of people that use debut but depending on the amount of customizations you do to it your site could look radically different than someone else using debut so don't really worry about that guys as you start uh building your site and customizing your site um you're going to you know you're gonna have a site that that is unique to your brand you know if you made it this far give yourself a pat on the back because this was you know my longest video i've published yet um you know and on that note if you guys enjoyed this video i'd really appreciate if you leave a like it really helps my channel and uh you know if you want to see more content like this consider subscribing and other than that if you're just choosing a theme right now for your site i really hope this video helped you also i wanted to thank you guys for the 100 subscribers and and you know i've gotten tons of comments on my videos of people asking me like can you do a video of this um can you can you help me with this issue and like keep those comments coming guys because i really you know i enjoy like doing this i enjoy helping you guys with your sites so yeah i hope this video uh helped you guys choose in choosing a theme for your site and i'll see you in the next one guys

Channel: Will Misback

Views: 1,650

Keywords: best free shopify themes, best free shopify theme, shopify theme guide, ranking shopify themes, shopify themes, shopify themes 2021, express, boundless, brooklyn, debut, narrative, simple, supply, venture, express theme, boundless theme, brooklyn theme, debut theme, narrative theme, simple theme, supply theme, venture theme, what is the best free shopify theme, what is the best shopify theme

Id: Z3VawqplnDI

Length: 61min 27sec (3687 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021