How to easily backup your Shopify theme

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The theme backup process

Navigate to the Themes page

• In your Shopify admin, in the left navigation, click the Online Store menu item. By default this will take you to the Themes page. This page can also be found at the top of the sub menu under Themes.

• On the main Themes page the current theme will be detailed along with a thumbnail, in this case we are using the default theme Debut. A range of both free and paid themes can be found via https://themes.shopify.com/, each one with variants depending on your requirements.

Make a copy of the current theme

• Click the Actions button to display your options.

• In this case we want to backup the current theme in use so the main website isn’t affected. From the dropdown, click on Duplicate. This will create a copy of the current Shopify theme.

Rename the theme copy

Now, you probably won’t want to leave the duplicate as simply ‘Copy of…’, as this may get confusing, especially with more than one. We would suggest a naming convention which will help with future backups too. In this case we’re going to use the name of the theme, an underscore and the date in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD). You don’t have to do this but find something that you are confident with and be consistent.

• Next to your theme copy will be two links, for Actions and Customize, similar to the current theme. Click Actions.
• From the dropdown, click Rename.

• You will now be prompted to rename your theme. Use the naming convention you have chosen. We will be renaming this theme Debut_2019-10-10.
• Click Rename.
• You have now successfully backed up your existing Shopify theme.

Summary

Make sure to take regular backups if you are planning on regular updates. It only takes a few minutes but gives you added reassurance that you can revert back to an older version of your theme at any point.

You may want to try a new theme but want to know what it looks like before publishing. In this case, you can even take a second copy to test edit the styles within the theme settings without affecting the main website.

The above article will hopefully help you to understand how to take a backup of your Shopify theme. We plan to add more throughout the coming months. If however, you’d like to discuss a particular Shopify query that we’ve not yet covered, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.