You can spend a lot of money on themes. Someone took the time to code the themes, so you have to pay for them. The thing is, if you’re just starting out with your online business, you’d be better off spending $100 on marketing than on a theme.
Did you know that you can get free themes for your Shopify store? These themes work, and you can’t try them out for free. As long as your store is open, you can use them for free.
Here, we’ll look at the best free Shopify themes you can use, as well as the most important things about them.
Venture
Venture is a theme for stores with a lot of items to sell. It has a bold look, and its main purpose is to help people who sell outdoor gear or sportswear.
Features:
- End-To-End Slide Show: The slides will take up the whole width of the website. Most themes don’t do this, so the left and right sides of the slides are blank. A big slideshow is a good way to get people’s attention, so use it to show off your best products or deals.
- Multiple Designs: With a single theme, you can pick the colors that work best for your shop. You can choose a light or dark theme based on how your brand wants to be seen.
- Multi-Column Menu With Photo: When a customer moves his mouse over a category or menu link, some photos in that category will pop up.
- You must use the Venture theme if you want to focus your marketing campaigns on pictures that make people want to buy something.
Brooklyn
This theme has two different designs, and like the Venture theme, the whole page is taken up by a slider. Classic and Playful describe the two styles. In Classic mode on Brooklyn, you can have two featured collections on the home page with photos that are the same size. In Playful mode, however, the featured collections have photos that are different sizes.
Features:
- Home Page Video: You can put a video on the home page of your store. You can put the link in with YouTube or Vimeo. If you do that, the thumbnail or screen shot of the video will show up on the home page instead of the link.
- Dynamic Product Display: The theme was made so that the photos are evenly spaced apart. If you only have two photos for five slots, the other three won’t stay empty. Instead, they will go away, and the two photos you uploaded will be spaced out evenly.
- Slide-Out Cart: This lets a customer add items to his cart and then go back to the previous page without clicking the back button. The cart will slide out, and he can make changes to it and then slide it back in to get back to the page he was on.
This theme is great if you don’t have more than 50 products to upload, which is its limit.
Supply
This theme is minimalist, which means that less is better. It comes in two designs: Blue and Light. You can add up to six collections to Blue, but only four to Light.
Features:
- Large Stock: You can add up to 50 products to both designs. It works well for businesses that sell watches, cameras, and other items that come in many different styles.
- Collection Filter: If you turn on the filter, a customer can use the filter option to choose which products he wants to show up. You can set these filter options, so if you want a filter for brand names or memory size, you can do that. This will make it easier for your customers to look around your store.
If you think you’ll need up to 50 slots for your products, the supply theme is a great choice. It’s also a good choice if you need six collections and want to be able to filter.
Minimal
If you choose this theme, you can choose from three different styles. We call these “vintage,” “fashion,” and “modern.”
The sliders on Vintage’s home page take up about 60% of the page, while Fashion’s slider is bigger. Modern has a small slider, but right after that, it has a list of collections.
Features:
- Home Page Video: If you have a link to a video on Vimeo or YouTube, you can embed it on your home page. This is best used to show off a product.
- Product Image Zoom: Just like on Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba, the customer can zoom in on a product photo by putting the mouse on a part of the photo.
- Product Filtering: You can set up filtering options for your customers to make it easier for them to narrow down the product specs of the items they’re looking for.
This theme will work best for products that don’t need a lot of noise, like herbal teas or single-product stores where you want a customer to see the value of your product and not a lot of ads or marketing photos.
Debut
There are two styles of Debut, which are called Default and Light. The only difference is that there are two sets of sliders for Light. The first set is at the top, and the second set is under the first set.
Features:
- Product Filtering: Like the other themes we’ve talked about so far, you can give your customers filtering options. This works best if you are selling a lot of different gadgets or brands.
- Multi-Menu: This theme lets you make a menu inside of a menu. For example, let’s say you have a category called Pants. Under that, you can add another set of menus like Formal Pants or Jeans. This makes it easy for your customers to find their way around your site and look at different types of products.
- Customer Reviews: The theme comes with a page for customer reviews. But you have to be the one to upload the testimonial. This is a great way to show off good things that customers have said about your business on your website.
- Promotional Banners: You can add a small line of text to a banner ad to get the attention of people who visit your site. This banner ad must be short and to the point. For example, it could say that shipping is free or that you get a certain amount off.
There’s a map in the theme, which makes it great for businesses with a physical location. The theme looks best on a desktop because you can put a lot of things there, such as magnifiers, social media icons, and blog posts.
Jumpstart
This is a theme made for new businesses. You can only show one product, but it gives you a lot of places to show photos of that one product.
Features:
- Crowdfunding Tracker: This is a part of the website where you can show people how much money you have already raised for your new business. This will also show your goal, and you can use this to get people to donate to your site.
- Video: You can put a video on the page to tell people about your product and why they should support your start-up.
- Email Subscription: Put this on your site so you can ask people to sign up for updates about your product or start-up. People who gave money to your cause are likely to sign up, so they can find out how your product is coming along.
- Sliders: You can put sliders after the part where you talk about your product’s features and benefits. It was made this way so that the photos on your sliders will show what you just said about the benefits of your product.
- FAQ: This section is already there, so you don’t have to use another app. In the FAQ, you’ll list the most common questions people might have about your product, and then you’ll answer those questions to help people understand.
Narrative
There are three designs for this theme. They are called Warm, Light, and Cold. You can put your brand name and logo in the middle of the top of these three designs. On the left is the menu, and on the right is the shopping cart. The Warm design doesn’t have any way to add a video, but the other two do.
Features:
- Hero Video is a video that you have to put in your website. As long as the customer is on that page, it will always play.
- Visual Storytelling: This theme was made to help you show off your product. You can put different photos of your products’ different parts on each part of the page. Use different zoomed-in parts of your product and add text to each one to describe what it does.
- Fixed Navigation: In this theme, the menu button is on the left, and you can’t move it to the top or to the right.
The store is great for people who like simple designs or who only want to sell one item. The theme can’t be used in stores with a lot of products.
Boundless
This theme was made so that photos can be shown off. It has a lot of spaces for pictures, so it works best for products like shoes and clothes that use models.
It comes in Black & White and Vibrant designs. For Black and White, the slider takes up the whole screen. Below that are big pictures of the products. Setup is similar for Vibrant, but there is a menu right below the slider.
Features:
- Fading Slideshow: Your photos won’t just slide out of your slideshow. They will go away before a new slider takes their place.
- Full-Width Collection Images. Most of the time, collection images are just squares or rectangles with a vertical orientation. Here, you can use the whole width of the screen. This will make the photo collection even more daring.
- Home Page Video. You can put a video right where the sliders are on the home page. Customers can watch your video by clicking the Play or Pause buttons.
This theme is great for people who can sell things by showing photos and writing less.
Simple
This theme’s look is very simple. The menu is on the left, and the photos of the products are at the top. It doesn’t have sliders, but you can put a photo in the banner if you want.
The page is focused on the list of products in the Featured Collection, so people who visit your site can see right away what’s for sale.
Features:
- Product Image Zoom: If a customer goes to the product page, he can click on the photo again and it will grow to fill the whole screen. There are arrows that he can use to move from one picture to the next.
- Image Animations: You can add animation to your brand photos and product photos, but not as videos, but as slideshow-style transitions.
- Related Products: When a customer walks into a store, similar products that they might like will be shown to them automatically. This will be chosen by the system based on what product your customer is looking at.
This is a good theme choice if you want your online store to be direct and simple, with few effects or extras that could distract customers.
Pop
Bone and Toy are the names of the two designs in the Pop theme. In both designs, the menu is on the left, and a large slider takes up about 70% of the width of the page. There aren’t many differences between the two, except that the Toy design’s menu uses a different color scheme.
Features:
- Slide-Out Cart: Customers can put items in the cart and make changes, like changing the number of items they want to buy, without leaving the page they are on.
- SideBar Menu: The menus are easy to find because they are in the sidebar, and the menu stays in place. The menu will still be there as the customer scrolls down.
- Product Image Zoom: When a customer moves their mouse over a picture of one of your products, they can choose to make it bigger. Make sure you take high-resolution pictures of your products.
- Slide Show: In this section, you can put several photos, and the site will move from one photo to the next.
Pop is a simple theme that works well for things like make-up kits or jewelry. The background is white, and it works best for photos with light colors.
Star
This theme wasn’t made by Shopify, but by a developer. There are two patterns on it, called Polaris and Sirius. The menu is on top of the screen in both themes, and the sliders take up the whole width of the screen. There is also a clickable button inside the slider. If a customer clicks this button, you can choose which page will open.
Features:
- Double Sliders: You can add another slide right below the product categories of collections, in addition to the one on top.
- Blog: You can add your blog to the bottom of the page, where you can also highlight three blog posts. You can show a picture with each article to get people interested and keep them on your site.
Star is great for stores that sell a lot of similar products, like skateboards and mountain bikes. You can put their pictures next to each other to help the customer decide which one he might buy.
Fashe
This theme is a fashion-forward one that is strong. It has a big slider that takes up the whole width of the screen, and the buttons inside this slider can be clicked.
Features:
- Account Creation: You can ask your customers to set up an account.
- Multiple Collections: You can put up to six collections on the home page, and each photo you add to a collection can have a button that can be clicked on.
- Different Photo Sizes: The pictures in the collection don’t all have the same size, which gives your collection pages a modern look.
- Filters: You can set up filters so that customers only have to check and uncheck boxes to narrow down their search to the products they want to see.
Annabelle
This idea is daring. On the home page, you can put a big photo with text and buttons that people can click on. Below that are your collections. Below that, you can show huge photos of your products, along with a description and price.
Features:
- Hidden Menu: The menu won’t show up on the home page unless the visitor moves the mouse over the menu icon.
- Account Creation: You can ask your customers to sign up for an account and log in so they can shop faster.
- Multiple Collections: You can add pages for many different collections to the home page. By default, the sire will only show three photos, but if a customer clicks on Load More, he will see more photos of different product categories.
This is a great theme for websites about fashion because the pictures of the collection are large and all the same size.
Summary
When choosing a theme, you should always think about how the customer will experience it and make sure it fits your niche. For fashion stores, you need themes that are bright and have big sliders. Use the Jumpstart theme for stores with only one item or for a new business.
Overall, it’s up to you to choose which of these 13 will work best for your business. Carefully look at how each one works, and then choose the one you can use the most.
