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Managing themes

The Themes page is the home for every theme your store owns. From here you add new themes, decide which one customers see, and move between published versions so you can roll back a bad change without re-editing anything.

Open Online store → Themes to manage the library. To actually edit a theme’s sections and settings, open it in the editor — see Themes & the visual editor and Using the visual editor.

Live theme vs. the library

Your store has exactly one live theme at a time — the one customers see — plus an unpublished library of other themes you’re working on or keeping in reserve.

  • The live theme sits at the top under Current theme with a green Live / Active badge.
  • Every other theme appears under Theme library, each marked Unpublished.

A library theme is completely private: editing it, previewing it, or publishing versions inside it never affects your storefront until you make that theme the live one.

Adding a theme

Use Add theme (top right) for three ways to get a new theme into your library.

  1. Browse public themes — search the free public themes at the bottom of the page and press Try theme. A copy lands in your library as an unpublished draft and opens in the editor. If the name is already taken, a number is appended automatically (e.g. Dawn 2).

  2. Upload zip file — import a theme .zip (templates, sections, snippets, assets, and so on). Give it a name and pick the file. See Import a theme ZIP for the full flow, including the Validate the imported theme is publishable and Ignore unsupported files options and the skipped-files report.

  3. Create blank theme — start from an empty theme. Enter a Theme name and an optional description; the new theme opens in the editor so you can build it up.

Every method creates the theme as Unpublished and seeds it with a working draft. The quick Upload zip and Create blank buttons in the Theme library header do the same thing as the menu items.

Publishing: what “Publish” means here

There are two different publish actions, and the difference matters:

  • Publish inside the editor turns your saved draft of a theme into a new numbered version of that same theme. It updates that theme’s live version but does not change which theme your storefront shows. (See saving and publishing.)
  • Publish on a library theme card activates that theme — it makes that theme the storefront’s live theme and demotes whichever theme was live before.

So a brand-new theme has to be published at least once in the editor (to create its first version) before it can be activated. The card’s Publish button stays available, but activation requires the theme to already have a published version — otherwise you’ll see “theme must be published before activation.”

Activate a library theme

  1. On the library theme’s card, confirm it has at least one published version (the Live version stat shows V1, V2, … rather than —). If it shows —, open it in the editor, save, and Publish first.

  2. Press Publish on the card.

  3. The theme moves up to Current theme with the green badge, and the previously live theme drops back into the library as Unpublished. Customers see the change immediately.

Versions and rollback

Every time you Publish a theme in the editor, the platform records an immutable, numbered version — a frozen snapshot of that theme at that moment. Versions are sequential per theme (V1, V2, V3, …), and exactly one of them is flagged Live for the theme.

To see them, press View versions on the current theme, or open the Actions menu and choose View versions on a library card. Each card shows its Published count and current Live version at a glance.

For every published snapshot you get three actions:

  • Make live (or Set live on a library theme) — point the theme at an earlier published snapshot. This is your rollback.
  • Browse — open that exact snapshot read-only in the code editor, so you can inspect what was published without touching the draft.
  • Use as draft — start a fresh draft from that snapshot, so you can branch new work off an older state and re-publish it.

Before an activation or rollback changes the storefront pointer, Sellerlane revalidates that exact published snapshot and checks that its compiled artifact is ready. It then rechecks the pinned version under the database lock. If the version changed, validation failed, or its artifact is incomplete, the switch is rejected and the current storefront stays live.

Roll back a bad publish

If a change looks wrong on the live store, you don’t need to fix and re-publish under pressure — just point the theme back at the last good snapshot.

  1. Open View versions on the affected theme.

  2. Find the last known-good snapshot in the list (the current one is tagged Live now).

  3. Press Make live on that snapshot and confirm in the dialog.

  4. The storefront switches to that snapshot right away, and the version that was live is archived. You can later open the broken version with Use as draft, fix it, and Publish a new version on top.

What you can’t do here

To keep the library predictable, the Themes page deliberately keeps the surface small. There is no rename, duplicate, download, or delete on a theme. Instead:

  • Need a copy to experiment on? Use Use as draft from a published version, or Try theme to add another public theme — both give you an independent theme without altering the original.
  • Want to revert? Use Make live on an older version rather than deleting work.
  • Renaming? Set the name when you create, import, or try a theme. There’s no after-the-fact rename on this page.

Theme files (Liquid, CSS, JSON locales) can be renamed and duplicated, but that happens inside the code editor — see Edit theme code.

Next steps

Import a theme ZIP

The full upload flow, validation options, and skipped-file report — Import a theme ZIP.

Related: Alternate templates · Navigation & content · Files