Shopify theme updater app — The disadvantages
One of the things to consider when buying a Shopify theme, is how the theme developers update their merchants theme. In this article I will show you the disadvantages of using a theme updater app and highlight the best alternative.
Why you need to update your Shopify theme?
As any online business, your site must be up to date, with new features, updating existing features and bugs fixing for better performance, this is why you need to update your theme frequently.
How to update your Shopify theme?
There are 3 ways to update your Shopiy theme :
1- Using a theme updater app (bad method)
A theme updater app, is a third party app that you install in your Shopify store in order to automatically update your theme, this would be great if can do the “job” automatically, but the truth it is not, it could be harmful for your business and put your online store at a risk, and here are the disadvantage of using a theme updater app.
✖ It will override your custom changes/codes
As an online business, you will always need to change some features functionalities, position, design, .. or add new features. The theme updater app will copy the new updated files into your Shopify theme and you will lose all your custom changes you have done in the past
✖ It may break your theme
Features are powered through codes (HTML, CSS, LIQUID, JS) and have some connectivity with other features within your theme, using a theme updater app, oculd break your theme and stop your online store from functioning
✖ Can conflicts with some existing apps in your store
Some third party apps in your store may not function well with the theme updater app
2- Upload the new theme ZIP (Good but it’s time consuming)
Since the theme updater app is a bad way to update your theme, the next way to update it is by uploading the new theme ZIP file and copy/paste your custom changes into it.
This is time consuming and requires the online store owner to either have some coding knowledge to know exactly what and where to copy the custom features into the new theme or you need to hire a developer to do the updates manually (the best method)
3- Update the theme manually
Update the theme manually by a Shopify expert: this is the best way to have your theme up to date while keeping your custom changes intact and fully functional.
The developer will make a copy of your live theme to keep all your custom changes and your app codes running and then implement the new updates manually.
This method could cost you few hundreds of dollars, because the developer need to compare your live theme with the new one in order to switch the new features into the old one, and ding into the codes to fix bugs.
Conclusion
When selecting a theme provider for your Shopify store, you need to pick the one that offers flexibility in term of updates, one of the best example is Plak Theme, who offer the manual updates to its merchants to maintain their business up to date without damaging any custom changes
