Switching themes on Shopify never touches your products, collections, customers, orders, pages, blog posts or menus. Those live in your store, not in the theme. What does live in the theme is the page layout: which sections sit on which template, and the text and images typed into those sections. This article sorts your old store into the two piles.
What carries over on its own
- Products, variants, prices, inventory and product images. Atrium reads them as any theme does. Swatches appear automatically for options that have a color or image set in the product's option values.
- Collections and their images. Filters come from the Search and Discovery app, so if you set them up for the old theme they are already there.
- Pages and blog posts. The text in a page's own content field renders through the Page content section. Anything the old theme drew from its own sections does not, see below.
- Navigation menus. Atrium's header shows up to three menu levels from the menu you pick under Menu. A menu with more levels shows the first three.
- Customer accounts, discount codes, shipping, taxes, payments and checkout. Untouched.
- Metafields. If your old theme stored staff data in product metafields, Atrium can read them for the expert directory, see Expert directory with metafields. Other metafields can be connected to any text setting with the dynamic source button in the editor.
What needs rebuilding
- Home page and every sectioned page. Section content is theme-specific. Open the old theme's editor in one tab and Atrium's in another, and copy the text across section by section. Recreate the demo store lists the sections in order.
- Services, locations and team. In Atrium these are section blocks. If your old theme kept them in an app, export the data first and paste from the export.
- Booking links. If you used an embedded booking widget, it will not carry over: Atrium builds booking links from your Zenoti IDs instead, see Connect Zenoti Webstore. You can still paste a widget into a Custom Liquid section if your provider requires one.
- Theme settings. Colors, fonts and spacing are set again under Theme settings. Pick the preset that is closest and adjust from there.
- App blocks. Apps that add blocks to the product page need to be added again through Add block in Atrium's product template. Apps that inject code through app embeds keep working without changes.
- Custom code. Anything a developer added to the old theme's files does not transfer. Make a list before you switch so nothing is missed.
Switch without downtime
- Keep the old theme published while you build Atrium as an unpublished theme. The editor's preview link lets you share it with colleagues before anyone else sees it.
- Build the home page, the services page, one location page and the product template first. Those carry most of the traffic.
- Check the pages your ads and social profiles link to. If a URL changes, add a redirect under Online Store → Navigation → URL redirects.
- Choose Publish in Atrium's editor. The old theme stays in your library, so switching back takes one click if you need to.
Preview safely
Shopify's theme preview shares a link that only shows the unpublished theme to people who have it. The preview bar at the bottom of the screen is Shopify's, not part of the theme: it disappears when you publish.