13 Mar
Majority of the visitors leave a website, if its layout is unattractive. As your store’s design is a visual representation of your ecommerce business, it not only needs to communicate what your brand is about but must also convey trustworthiness. After all, if a site doesn’t look professional, customers aren’t going to want to shop on it.
Luckily, the free Shopify themes available to sellers are all high-quality designs, but not every theme is a good fit for your brand.
How to select the best free Shopify theme?
Brick-and-mortar retail stores are designed to draw customers in, showcase products, and give people a preview of the shopping experience they can expect from the brand. Online stores should do the same thing, which is why the theme you select for your Shopify store is so important.
So don’t install a free Shopify theme at random. First, consider the following questions:
- What kind of experience do you want to create for customers?
- What features do you want in your store?
- How many products do you need to showcase?
- How do you want to display those products?
- What are your competitors doing that you like or dislike?
Once you have a clear idea of what your Shopify theme needs to accomplish, you’re ready for an in-depth look at the best free Shopify themes available.
As you browse the top six themes below, keep in mind that you’re not tied to the fonts of colors featured in the examples. These features are customizable, so you can easily make them fit your brand.
Top free Shopify themes
Let’s take a look at the top best free Shopify themes.
1. Brooklyn
Brooklyn is an elegant free Shopify theme. Designed with fashion and apparel retailers in mind, this theme comes in two styles: Classic and Playful. The Classic version of the theme has a minimalistic look, while the Playful variant is more colorful and vibrant. Brooklyn features include an edge-to-edge home page slideshow, a dynamic product grid, and product pages with at-a-glance availability for each size.
You can prepare Brooklyn for your online store by customizing its sections and theme settings. It features a slide-out cart and a dynamic product grid, as well as a homepage slideshow that allows you to showcase your most popular products. There’s also a section for adding a video to your homepage to tell your brand story or announce a new product.
Moreover, Brooklyn is fully responsive and works amazingly well on both desktop and mobile devices. It’s also optimized for search engines.
2. Debut
Debut is a flexible theme that is suitable for all stores, regardless of inventory size. With Debut you can quickly set up a store and start selling. It looks polished without any theme customizations. Another amazing thing about this theme is it’s completely free.
Additionally, debut comes in 2 styles: Default and Light. Also, it displays live search results and quick links for products and store pages. The theme is optimized for mobile devices and SEO-friendly. It supports multi-level menus and advanced product filtering.
Debut comes with a dedicated customer testimonial and product recommendation sections, as well as a promotional header bar. It also consists of built-in styles and color palettes.
3. Minimal
Minimal is a free theme with simple and clean design. It is a wide-layout responsive theme that looks great on any device. Loaded with features designed to give you complete flexibility, you can customize your store with additional layout options, product views, collection views, navigation styles, and typography choices.
It comes in three styles: Vintage, Modern and Fashion. By default, it includes image zoom for products, related product suggestions and product filtering. This theme is packed with features that make it easy for anyone to customize the feel and look of the store. Minimal is an excellent pick for the company that doesn’t want design to detract from its offerings.
4. Narrative
Narrative is a boutique theme designed for visual storytelling. What makes Narrative unique is its focus on imagery to tell a story. By default, the home page has a full-width slideshow, an image with text, and a video. This layout has a strong visual impact and lets you tell your brand story without a lot of text.
Furthermore, it comes in three different styles: Earthy, Warm, Cold and Light. It features a wide layout that enables you to show off your high-resolution product photography in the best possible way. The theme uses a fixed navigation system. It’s optimized for mobile devices and SEO-ready.
5. Boundless
Boundless is a photography-first theme with a minimal UI that features edge-to-edge photography. It is mobile-first and suited for stores with medium to large inventories. It features large, high-resolution images in a dedicated product gallery.
Moreover, it keeps the menu fixed to the top of your page as you scroll down. Boundless comes in two styles: Black & White and Vibrant. The Black & White variant of the theme is rather conservative, while Vibrant has a more playful feel.
Both versions of the theme put product photography at the center of attention. They’re perfect for brands that want to showcase their stunning product imagery. The theme supports an image zoom feature and includes a built-in related products section. Also the homepage features a slideshow with video support.
6. Supply
Supply is a clean, easy-to-navigate theme perfect for merchants with large inventories and several collections. Features include prominent navigation, multiple home page collections, sidebar filtering, and easy integration with the Product Reviews app.
It’s a free Shopify theme which is suitable for online stores of all sizes but aimed at those with large product catalogs. There are two styles you can choose from: Blue and Light. Blue uses a simple white-and-blue color scheme suitable for electronics stores, while Light takes advantage of neutral colors to achieve a different look that might be more suited for retailers in the fashion industry.
Supply features a homepage slideshow and a sticky navigation menu. It also comes with advanced product filtering and sorting capabilities that allow shoppers to have an easier time finding the products they need.
7. Venture
Venture is a bold yet minimal theme designed for high volume stores with large inventories. Features include an edge-to-edge slideshow, multi-column drop-down menus, and a promotional bar. The venture theme is an alternative to Supply that features a user-friendly filtering tool, so shoppers can find exactly what they’re looking for.
The theme comes in three different styles: Boxing, Outdoors and Snowboards. As the style names imply, Venture is aimed at ecommerce businesses selling sports and outdoor equipment.
The theme was designed to be fully responsive and look great on both desktop and mobile devices. It features a homepage slideshow, advanced product filtering and a promotional banner that enables businesses to advertise sales, promotions and special offers.
8. Simple
Simple is a clean and minimal theme, perfect for showcasing products. Its features include a mobile-first responsive design, sidebar navigation, image animations, and product image zoom. Another amazing thing is it a free theme and is SEO friendly.
There are two different styles when using Simple: Light and Beauty. Both styles use plenty of white space, which allows your product photos to stand out on each page.
Simple comes with a sidebar drop-down menu that enables shoppers to navigate through your product offering more easily, and a zoom feature that helps them take a closer look at your products.
There’s also a dedicated related products section which you can use to showcase other products that might interest shoppers and an announcement bar for promoting deals, offers and new products.
9. Multifly
Multifly is a free Shopify theme designed for ecommerce businesses in the fashion industry. It features a responsive design that helps it look amazing on both desktop and mobile devices.
It’s optimized for search engines and comes with multi-language and multi-currency support, as well as advanced product filtering and sorting options. The theme also features a homepage slideshow with video support, as well as featured products, blog and testimonial sections.
There’s also a lookbook section fashion brands can use to showcase different styles and then link to all the products featured in each look, as well as an Instagram feed section that can be used to display a brand’s latest Instagram posts.
Multifly includes support for promotional banners, which can be used to advertise deals, sales and special offers. It also enables brands to use videos on product pages to give shoppers a better look at the products they sell.
10. Hurst
Hurst is a Shopify theme designed for ecommerce businesses in the furniture industry. It comes with drop-down and sticky navigation menu support, and includes promotional banners and custom product tabs.
Hurst enables ecommerce businesses to create a website that suits their every need with the help of custom sections, such as those for related products and product reviews. There’s also a blog section that businesses can use to post news related to their products or publish blog posts on topics that interest their customers.
Hurst is a fully responsive theme and looks amazing on both desktop and mobile screens.
Conclusion
With Shopify’s free themes, you have enough to get started in setting up a modern-looking and easy-to-navigate store. A free theme could be good starting point for ecommerce businesses still in their early stages. By not spending money on website design, you can invest in other aspects of the business, such as marketing.
However, once your business and needs start growing, you might want to consider a more advanced, paid Shopify theme to better suit your needs better in terms of both design and functionality.