What Is Shopify 2.0? Is it Worth Upgrading?

Shopify 2.0 is Shopify’s next-generation theme engine. This represents significant changes to the Shopify online ecommerce platform, with improvements that are designed to make it more scalable to larger ecommerce businesses.

Shopify 2.0 has the potential to change the way Shopify is seen in the ecommerce world – moving from a platform for startups and small businesses to one that can accommodate larger ecommerce businesses.

What are these changes and is it worth upgrading to Shopify 2.0 to take advantage of them?

Sections make up the different parts of a page, such as banners or blocks of text. Sections in Shopify allow you to build up your page and move different elements around without the need to hard code these elements.

Traditionally, Shopify limited this capability to homepages only. Now, with Shopify 2.0, you can work with ‘sections everywhere’ on your site.

On any page of your store, you’ll now be able to move different parts of the content around to maximise the impact of your layout. In Shopify 2.0, you simply do this through the faster and more customisable theme editor.

If you’ve ever wanted to add a banner or other design element to a page, product or blog post, you may have had to use a custom page builder, app or asked a developer to code this for you. This all changes with the new Shopify 2.0 sections which allow sections you have created to be used on any page across your site.

For Shopify developers there are also new features, making the applications of different fonts, colours, margins and other elements easier – we have found some difficulties with this so some custom Shopify development is usually still required.

Another really useful feature of Shopify 2.0 is the metafields function.

Metafields are extra bits of data you can add to individual pages or items.

For example, you might want to add an ingredient list or size chart to an individual product. With the new metafields function, you can do this directly in the Shopify editor without the need for additional coding or apps.

It’s not limited to product pages either. You can add more fields to orders, customers or other sections of your site.

Metafields also works with different media such as images and PDF files. The metafield picker will let you upload your selected media to product pages for immediate use. You simply access them through the settings or files section.

Traditionally, there’s not been that much flexibility in how you embed apps and how they interact with your Shopify store.

This changes with Online Store 2.0. It delivers apps in blocks within a page. This new modular approach to apps means that you’ll have full control over which pages the app appears, as well as the page locations.

You can add or remove apps and change app settings through the theme editor too.

This is also for site speed, something that is becoming more and more important for SEO (search engine optimisation), which brings us onto the next point….

Other key benefits of Shopify 2.0 are improved loading speeds, which can help with both user experience, site conversion rate and SEO.

Shopify’s new default theme Dawn is said to be 35% faster than the current standard theme, Debut. With over half of Shopify merchants currently using Debut, we would more than recommend switching to Dawn to take advantage of the better site speed and take advantage of the new features available in Shopify 2.0.