Top 8 Best Free Shopify Themes For New Business In 2024

Tony Pham Jun 26 2024

So, you've decided to create your own Shopify store and are excited to start making millions. But with so many theme choices on Shopify, it can be overwhelming to decide which one to use. We're here to help!

In this article, we'll show you the top 8 best free Shopify themes, carefully selected for their performance and user-friendly designs. These themes will enhance your store’s appearance, improve user experience, increase site speed, and boost sales.

The importance of having a good Shopify theme

When it comes to Shopify themes, most people overthink the aesthetic part while ignoring other important aspects such as loading speed, ease of customization, and responsiveness,... This mistake can ruin your early business in a lot of ways.

So, before we dive into our top picks, let’s talk about why choosing the right theme for your Shopify store is such a big deal.

Impact on User Experience and Sales

Imagine walking into a that’s cluttered, hard to navigate, and unappealing. You wouldn’t want to buy anything from that store. The same goes for online stores.

Your theme determines the layout, navigation, and overall look and feel of your store. A well-designed theme makes it easy for customers to find what they're looking for, encourages them to explore more products, and ultimately makes them more likely to make a purchase. A great user experience translates directly into higher sales and better customer satisfaction.

Benefits of Using Free Themes

When you’re starting out, budget constraints are a real concern. Free Shopify themes offer a fantastic opportunity to create a professional-looking store without spending a fortune.

These themes come equipped with essential features that cater to various business needs, allowing you to set up shop with minimal financial investment. Plus, they give you the flexibility to customize and upgrade as your business grows.

Top 8 best free Shopify themes in 2024

Let’s explore the top 8 best free Shopify themes of 2024. We will go through each theme, highlighting its key features and benefits. From there, you will be able to pick one that is the most suitable for your business.

Dawn

Overview

Dawn is one of the 12 free Shopify themes developed by Shopify itself. It is currently used by more than 800,000 Shopify stores. Dawn is a minimalist theme with an elegant design. The simplicity of design is the reason so many people love using this theme.

Highlighted features

Minimalist design: The theme offers a classy, professional look that is loved by both companies and customers at the moment. The image of your products will be featured on the front page with high resolution.
Customization options: Dawn allows you to customize color schemes and animations, product display frames, content layouts, marketing tools, and eCommerce features.
Easy to use: Anyone can use Dawn thanks to its intuitive and user-friendly design. The drag-and-drop editing system allows users to effortlessly customize the theme however they want without touching any code.
eCommerce features: While Dawn is free, the theme is fully equipped with all the basic features that an eCommerce website needs, including the sticky mega menu, lookbook, recommended products, and product video.
Mobile responsiveness: In the current age of mobile, it is a must for any website to work flawlessly on different mobile devices. Dawn has proven to be extremely flexible and able to adapt to most screen sizes.
Compatibility with apps: Dawn is compatible with all Shopify apps.
Performance and speed: Dawn is not very well-known for its speed. With a small inventory, the theme works fine, but its performance becomes unstable the more you add.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

An ideal choice for small businesses that have limited funding.
The design is clean and modern, making the image of products the spotlight.
The performance of the theme is amazing across most devices.
It is easy to use, especially for people with limited technical skills.

Doesn’t have advanced customizations that other premium themes can offer.

It can cover the basic need, but there are no advanced features that a large eCommerce site needs like sophisticated filtering or 3D product models.
The performance of the theme is not optimized for stores with a large number of products.
The design of the theme can be quite generic and not stand out.

Best suited for

Anyone. When you sign up for a Shopify account, Dawn will be your default theme and it is that way for a reason. Dawn is suitable for literally any store that sells tangible products. If you are just getting started with a few dozen products then Dawn can never be a bad option.

However, as your business grows bigger, Dawn won’t be able to keep up when more advanced demands arise.

Studio

Overview

The Studio theme is one of the best free Shopify themes for eCommerce and art. It is packed with features delicate to show artwork, or beautiful products for an immersive shopping experience. With this theme, you can tell visitors your story through stunning visuals of your artworks or products.

Highlighted features

Dynamic design: As one of the more artistic themes on Shopify, Studio offers many different styles that you can choose from to elevate your brand’s voice.
Customization options: Studio lets you choose among different layouts, animation options, and colors. This is the strongest suit of this theme and its main factor to draw in customers.
Easy to use: Despite a wide range of customization options, it is really easy for you to add content, change layout, or modify your Shopify store with Studio.
eCommerce features: While the strength of Studio is its amazing ways of showcasing your products, it is still fully equipped with all the basic eCommerce features. You’ll have nothing to worry about trying to sell anything on this theme.
Mobile responsiveness: As more and more customers are using phones to surf the web, it is essential for the theme to adapt well to different screen sizes. This is not a problem for Studio thanks to its flexible design.
Compatibility with apps: As an official Shopify theme, Studio is fully compatible with all Shopify apps should you need more functionalities for your business.
Performance and speed: Even though Studio focuses on displaying high-quality images, the speed of this theme doesn’t suffer at all thanks to the top-notch programming.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Stunning visual, curated for artists and collection display. Let you tell your story through different formats, like videos, slideshows, and lookbooks. Delicate features for artists such as artist profile, and intuitive collection. Drag-and-drop customization with great flexibility to make a personalized, unique website.	The themes need more color schemes to accommodate the needs of artists and brands with strange styles. As one of the newer Shopify themes, not all third-party apps will work perfectly with the theme. Too many features might confuse people who don’t have much experience with Shopify.

Best suited for

Art, fashion, and photography businesses. The Studio theme was built to accommodate the need of honoring, and highlighting products with creative flair. The layout presents your product in a way that screams exclusivity, quality, and uniqueness.

Spotlight

Overview

The Spotlight theme’s main purpose is to sell products fast and efficiently. It has a simple, clean design that allows users to browse through your collections easily and effortlessly. Even if this is your first day in the eCommerce space, you won’t have any trouble at all navigating and setting up this theme.

Highlighted features

Minimalist design: The theme doesn’t waste any second and immediately introduces viewers to a catalog of your products on the front page. Everything is streamlined and user-friendly.
Customization options: Spotlight customization options focus mainly on the product page and checkout page, which help your customers make quick decisions and make purchases quickly.
Easy to use: All you need to do is enter a short brand description and you are good to go. That’s how easy it is, no flashy extravagant setup.
eCommerce features: Spotlight provides you with just enough features to get customers to find what they need quickly and buy it.
Mobile responsiveness: As the layout of Spotlight is very basic and simple, it has no problem whatsoever adapting to any screen size.
Compatibility with apps: Spotlight is compatible with all the latest apps on Shopify.
Performance and speed: Spotlight is optimized for speed and load time. It prevents users from getting impatient and provides an overall smooth shopping experience.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

A great theme for beginners to learn the basic features of Shopify while keeping the store running.
Everything is straightforward and easy to use for both yourself and your customers.
The minimalist design keeps the focus on your collection of products and nothing else.

Doesn’t offer many customization options or personalization.

The collection doesn’t have much support for a wide range of different types of products.
Doesn’t include many marketing functionalities.
Some settings don’t work properly.

Best suited for

New entrepreneurs who just need a simple working store for customers to place their orders. The theme is user-friendly and needs minimum setup, which is helpful for people who are trying to learn eCommerce for the first time.

The basic layout of the theme can also give visitors an intimate, unpolished, familiar feeling for customers, which is perfect for handmade goods sellers.

Refresh

Overview

Refresh is a standard theme for everyone to set up their eCommerce store. The theme was built like a landing page to drive the focus of customers to your core products and their benefits. Customers can quickly understand your products and make purchases right after they enter the website.

Highlighted features

Modern design: The big banner on every page will be the first thing visitors see every time they enter. This provides a great opportunity to impress them with the large image and the outstanding strength of your feature products.

Customization options: The Shopify Refresh theme provides a variety of customization options, enabling you to match your store to your brand's aesthetic. You can adjust the color palette, typography, layout, and more to showcase your brand's unique identity.

Easy to use: Setting up this theme is super easy and fast. You should not have any problem editing the website whatsoever.

eCommerce features: Refresh provides all the standard eCommerce features plus some of its own such as Promotion Nanners and Product Suggestions.
Mobile responsiveness: Refresh has no problem fitting into all screen sizes, including smartphones and tablets. This ensures that your website can convey your message fully to a wider audience.
Compatibility with apps: Refresh Shopify theme can integrated with a large number of third-party apps, covering a wide range of functionalities for your business.
Performance and speed: The loading speed and performance of Refresh are nothing but amazing.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Setup is simple and easy. The loading speed and performance of the theme are impeccable. Great layout for storytelling, highlighting top products, and stand-out features. Have a wide range of customization options.	Lack some useful features such as sale notifications, and breadcrumbs. Some settings don’t work properly.

Best suited for

Online stores that want to showcase their top products. Refresh theme works well for most industries. However, businesses such as fashion boutiques, home decor stores, beauty, and skincare brands will make the most use of the theme thanks to its informative setup.

Sense

Overview

Sense is an energetic theme with light, bright colors, and soft gradients. The theme creates an overall gentle feeling. Most people love this theme for its ease of use and elegant design.

Highlighted features

Elegant design: The design and layout of Sense make it one of the best free Shopify themes. It makes use of soft gradients, light colors, and round corners to create a soothing feeling for visitors.
Customization options: You can freely customize your website any way you like using the premade blocks and customs blocks of the Senes theme. There are more than enough options for you to create the perfect store.
Easy to use: Sense is a great option for both experienced users and beginners because it is very easy to use while still offering loads of features and options.
eCommerce features: With many standout features in Sense such as Advertising Banners, Mega Menu, Upsell, and Cross-Sell, you have all the tools you need
Mobile responsiveness: Sense will display your collections flawlessly on a tablet, a desktop, or a mobile phone without any issues.
Compatibility with apps: You won’t find any problems integrating apps into the Sense theme most of the time.
Performance and speed: Overall, the speed and performance of the Sense theme are great. However, certain applications might affect its performance.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Having all the necessary eCommerce features to grow your store. Perfect for non-tech users who don’t have experience in coding. The design is clean, friendly, and bright, bringing a relaxed feeling to visitors. The loading speed is amazing.	Certain elements of the theme might take more time to set up. Editing might take some time to show on the website due to some bugs. The new update caused some confusion for users regarding color schemes.

Best suited for

Sense is an optimized Shopify theme ideal for small businesses and newcomers across all industries, particularly those requiring creativity, such as health and beauty, fashion and accessories, and food and beverage.

However, the Sense theme is not suitable for businesses with large catalogs, highly technical products, or brands with playful imagery.

Craft

Overview

Just as the name suggested, the Craft Shopify theme is meant for businesses that focus on handmade, artisanal, and crafted products. Craft theme gives visitors a feeling of delicacy and finesse with a neutral color palette and elegant typography.

Highlighted features

Elegant design: Craft minimalist design gives your store the feeling of an old luxurious building. The neutral colors plus the font with sharp edges somehow really catch the eye.

Customization options: You have a wide range of options to customize the appearance and layout of the store to accommodate the style of your brand. You can change colors, fonts, layout, and more.

Easy to use: Just like every other theme made by Shopify, it is simple to set up and customize Craft even if you are not really tech-savvy.

eCommerce features: The theme is equipped with essential tools for you to succeed in the world of eCommerce. You will need to take your time and learn which one will benefit you the most cause there are quite a lot of them.
Mobile responsiveness: There is no problem if your customers are using the website from different devices, be it desktops, tablets, or smartphones.
Compatibility with apps: Craft theme is guaranteed to remain up-to-date and compatible with Shopify's continuously expanding feature set.
Performance and speed: Craft gets amazing scores in loading speed and performance, which is great for SEO and increases users’ satisfaction.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
The minimalistic and refined design of the theme enhances your credibility with your customers. Intuitive navigation with high-quality visuals. Put the focus on your products.	While the theme has many customization options, it is still limited compared to a premium theme. Certain features are missing such as dynamic product recommendations or abandoned cart recovery. While the theme looks amazing, its overall style might not be suitable for some products.

Best suited for

Home and decor businesses or handmade, artisanal, and crafted products. However, if you are looking for a long-term solution with more customization, you will want to look into premium themes.

Ride

Overview

The Shopify Ride theme has a slick design combined with a black background and bold typography. It also allows you to add detailed information about your product, which is suitable for sportswear, and sports equipment products.

Highlighted features

Striking design: The color scheme has high contrast, plus the asymmetrical design sends a bold, active vibe to customers.

Customization options: The Shopify Ride Theme is highly customizable, allowing you to prepare your online store by adding and personalizing sections and blocks, as well as adjusting theme settings—all without editing code.

Easy to use: There is nothing too complicated about Ride. However, since Ride focuses more on story-telling, you do need to fill out more content and information.

eCommerce features: High-res images and videos are amazing to tell the world your story. The theme also has a Quick Buy feature, Product Reviews, Promotion banners, and a host of other features to step up your eCommerce business.

Mobile responsiveness: The theme is fully optimized for mobile screens. Your customers won’t have any problem entering the site from any devices.
Compatibility with apps: The theme should work with most third-party apps. However, some third-party apps might not work very well together and might conflict.
Performance and speed: The overall speed and performance of the theme are great. However, some people have experienced delays on some occasions.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
High-contrast color scheme with stand-out design. High-resolution images and videos. Allowing you to showcase a lot of detailed information about your products.	No live chat support function. The loading speed can fluctuate sometimes.

Best suited for

Small businesses in the sportswear, gym, and fitness industries. The theme provides just what you need to capture the attention of visitors and lead them to your products.

Origin

Overview

Origin is a unique theme designed to sell a single product. Everything on the website is going to revolve around one single product using a neutral color scheme and fun typography.

Highlighted features

Calming design: The color scheme of Origin is mostly neutral, which gives the feeling of refinement and high craftsmanship. The theme uses a one-column layout with the product on top followed by its information below.
Customization options: You can change the design, layout, and colors of the theme to match your brand identity easily using Shopify's built-in tools.
Easy to use: You will find setting up Origin takes little to no effort. The customization is also very intuitive thanks to the drag-and-drop system.
eCommerce features: The theme offers features such as a stock counter, image galleries, product videos, recommended products, and cart notes.
Mobile responsiveness: The theme is completely optimized for mobile screens, allowing your customers to seamlessly access your site from any device.
Compatibility with apps: Integrating third-party apps into the theme should pose no problem at all.
Performance and speed: Origin has impressive performance & loading speeds.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
The setup is quick and simple. The loading speed and page performance are top-notch.	There are no collection pages since the theme is built for one single product. The customization options are limited. Compared to premium themes, Craft doesn’t feature as many customization options. Some existing visual problems were reported by users.

Best suited for

Businesses selling hand-made products, custom-made products. If you are looking for a theme that empathizes on the uniqueness of your hand-made products, then Origin is definitely worth considering.

How to choose the best free Shopify themes for your business

Which features does your online store need?

Each business requires different features and layouts. You need to know which features your business needs to achieve your goal. For example, here is the list of features you might want for your online store:

Pop-ups
Shopping cart
Drop-down menus
Navigation
Landing pages
Product search and filters
Carousel or slider
Sign-in and sign-up
Size charts
Image zoom

Make a list just like that then start reviewing it, and arrange them from top to bottom according to your priorities and needs.

Make sure the theme matches the aesthetic of your brand

Not only the color schemes, the layouts, the fonts, the shapes, and the lines used in a theme will give visitors different vibes and feelings. This part is crucial since the online will be the forefront of your brand identity online.

A good theme will help you create an online presence that is memorable for your customers.

Key features to look for

When choosing a theme, keep an eye out for these critical features:

Responsiveness: More and more people are shopping on their mobile devices. A responsive theme ensures your store looks great and functions well on any screen size.
Customization Options: Look for themes that allow you to tweak colors, fonts, and layouts. This way, you can tailor the look of your store to match your brand’s identity.
Speed: A fast-loading theme keeps customers from bouncing away out of frustration. Google also considers page speed in its ranking algorithm, so it’s crucial for SEO.
SEO-Friendliness: Themes that are optimized for search engines can help your store rank higher in search results, bringing in more organic traffic.
Built-In Features: Features like product sliders, promotional banners, and customer testimonials can enhance the shopping experience without the need for additional apps.

Understanding these aspects can help you make a more informed decision about which theme will best serve your business. A good theme lays the foundation for a successful online store, driving customer engagement and boosting sales right from the start.

Get your online business to the next level with Nextsky

If you are just starting out small, a free Shopify website might be enough. However, as your business grows, these free options will start to cost you your business.

Free themes often lack advanced features and customization options. This leads to a poor user experience, longer load times, and a generic look that fails to stand out in a competitive market. If you have enough budget, don’t be hesitate to invest in a high-quality Shopify theme right at the start and I guarantee that you won’t regret it.

Our expert at Nextsky specializes in creating high-quality Shopify themes that will elevate your Shopify store's performance and aesthetics. Check out our premium Shopify themes collection or if you prefer something more tailored to specific needs, feel free to contact us.

For more information about Shopify check out these articles:

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Which free Shopify theme is best?

Dawn is the best free Shopify theme due to its modern, minimalist design, fast performance, and ease of use. Dawn is the default theme whenever you want to open a new Shopify store.

What is a Shopify theme?

A theme controls the organization, features, and style of your online store. Different themes have distinct styles and layouts, offering varied experiences for your customers. For instance, if you're selling spa products, you might want your online store to feel relaxed and luxurious.

What Shopify theme do luxury brands use?

Prestige is a premier Shopify theme tailored for luxury fashion brands, exuding sophistication and elegance. Its sleek and modern design is highly customizable, allowing brands to create a unique and polished online presence.

Key features include advanced product filtering, high-resolution image galleries, and customizable content sections that enhance the shopping experience.

Are paid Shopify themes worth it?

Paid Shopify themes are often worth the investment due to their superior design quality, advanced features, and extensive customization options. They help create a professional and unique online store that stands out and aligns with your brand identity.

For businesses serious about providing a top-notch shopping experience and driving growth, the advantages of paid themes can justify the cost.

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Tony Pham

Hello! I'm Tony Pham, a full-stack Shopify, Magento, and WordPress developer with over 12 years of experience in both front-end and back-end development.

Since 2016, I have been proudly working at Nextsky as the Tech Lead, where I continue to enhance my skills and contribute to exciting projects. One of my proudest works is the Agile theme, which passed Shopify's high standard and is currently available on Shopify Theme Store.

I am passionate about researching new technologies and staying updated with the latest trends in the industry. It not only makes my life more fulfilling and exciting but also allows me to bring better service to clients.

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