Shopify Dawn Theme: A Review of Shopify’s New Standard Theme

Your Shopify theme sets the tone for your brand experience.

As you build or redesign your Shopify stores, it’s important to start with a strong foundation—namely, a theme that matches your brand aesthetics and provides optimal functionality for your business needs.

The Shopify Dawn theme is now the default theme for all new Shopify stores.

To get an idea of why, let’s dive into some of the theme’s key features, pros, cons, and customization options.

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What is the Shopify Dawn theme?

Currently, Shopify Dawn is the reference theme for Online Store 2.0, replacing its predecessor, Debut.

This updated theme provides a fresh and modern look for stores along with stronger features and functionalities.

Shopify’s development team designed it to maximize the following elements:

• Performance
• Flexibility
• Ease of use

As a result, Dawn is a lightweight, mobile-first theme that uses minimal JavaScript to enhance user flexibility and trim down complexity.

Shopify Dawn vs. Debut themes

The Dawn Shopify theme outperforms Debut in several key areas:

• Speed: Dawn was refined for optimal performance, with a 35% faster load speed than Debut.
• Mobile experience: To achieve an intuitive, mobile-first theme, Shopify designed Dawn for mobile screens first, then adapted it for desktops.
• Content sections: Dawn accommodates content sections for all page types, resulting in more room for customization.
• Flexibility: Brands can easily customize pages on Dawn using moveable sections and blocks for products, images, videos, and more—without the need for coding.
• Compatibility: In addition to its superb performance across desktop to mobile devices, Dawn also works on all internet browsers.

Who is Dawn best for?

In short, everyone. Shopify’s Dawn theme is great for brands of all sizes across various industries.

Whether you sell physical goods or are exclusively online, Dawn offers lots of opportunities to showcase your offerings.

The theme is made for visual storytelling, an advantage Cards For All People capitalizes on well.

The maker of casual party games fills their Shopify store with photos of their products, as well as showcases a video of people playing one of their games as visitors scroll further down.

The premium supplement brand MegaFood follows a similar path, incorporating photos of not only their selection but also ones that represent and align with customer health goals.

As a result, navigating the store is much smoother and more intuitive.

No matter the business, Dawn provides a solid foundation for a professional, sleek, and minimalistic Shopify store.

Plus, when paired with a page-building app like Shogun, brands can enjoy greater flexibility and advanced customization to unlock the theme’s full potential.

Top features of the Dawn theme

Dawn comes with an impressive array of features, all of which were made to enhance your online store’s appearance and functionality.

Some of the most notable are:

• Responsive design: Dawn’s optimized performance guarantees a seamless browsing experience across various devices and makes your store more accessible.
• Versatile layout options: Dawn has a healthy selection of page templates so you can best showcase your brand’s identity and products.
• Dynamic product grid: This enables Dawn’s product and collection grid sections to adjust image ratios automatically for a uniform layout.
• Merchandising: You can create image galleries and slideshows, incorporate videos, show ingredients, and more in Dawn to create a top-notch visual experience for your offering.
• Quick buy: Through Dawn, customers can add products to their cart without leaving their current page, streamlining the purchasing process and reducing friction.
• Product search, filtering, and recommendations: Built-in product discovery features allow customers to browse your catalog easily and find what they’re looking for.

Pros and cons of the Dawn theme

Shopify’s Dawn theme boasts several advantages that make it highly popular among merchants.

However, like any theme, it has a few drawbacks worth considering before jumping on the bandwagon. I’ve broken down both factors to simplify your decision-making.

Shopify Dawn pros

“The speed and customization of [Dawn] has been a game changer. With so many elements that can be altered depending on the page, our clients have a lot more control on the aesthetic of their site and can get creative with the assets they have.

Considering it’s free, our smaller clients and those looking to validate a proof of concept have opted to use it, as it provides a lot of premium-type features without incurring any costs while testing their new sites.”

— Dan Gray, CEO of Vendry

The theme’s modern design, responsiveness, and improved usability yield numerous benefits for online businesses:

• Easy setup: Setting up Dawn requires minimal effort, enabling you to launch your store quickly. It also supports app blocks, which ease the integration of theme app extensions.
• Conversion optimization: Faster load speeds convert more customers and at a higher rate. According to Portent, websites that load in one second have 2.5 times more conversions than those that load in five and 1.5 times more than those that load in 10.
• Mobile commerce: Over 270 million US consumers own smartphones, and at least 79% of them have made an online purchase with them. Being a mobile-first theme, Dawn makes your online store friendlier to that massive consumer base.
• Accessibility: Dawn was built to follow Shopify’s best practices for accessibility. Since 75% of Americans with disabilities use the internet daily, addressing their needs allows you to tap into this audience more effectively.
• Affordability: The Shopify Dawn theme comes with multiple powerful features, particularly for a free theme. Merchants can test it for compatibility without incurring any extra costs.

Experts praise the Shopify Dawn theme for its visual appeal, sure, but also its versatility, ease of use, and beginner-friendliness.

The above tweet is CRO expert Mathias Schrøder’s response when asked what he thought about certain Shopify themes.

Schrøder’s advice highlights how Dawn’s overall versatility, along with a bit of A/B testing, enables new merchant’s to grow their store on their own (which normally is no easy task).

Spot AI’s Director of Engineering, Kelly Vaughn, also spotlighted Dawn’s improved usability on Twitter, as shown above.

Shopify Dawn cons

“The limited advanced SEO options in Shopify Dawn can put businesses at a disadvantage, especially those that require a more advanced SEO strategy.

This makes it difficult to compete with other online stores that offer more sophisticated options, like optimizing website URLs with schema markup and optimizing site speed.”

— Milo Cruz, CMO at Freelance Writing Jobs

Despite its advantages, Dawn suffers from certain limitations:

• Restrictive customization: Compared to paid themes, Dawn’s appearance is noticeably basic, and choices for tweaking your store’s aesthetics are less abundant.
• Limited SEO options: Although Dawn comes with the basics needed for search engine optimization, you aren’t able to do more advanced targeting like setting target keyphrases.

• Additional apps and costs: Being a free theme, Dawn may require extra apps for added functionality, which increases your expenses.
• Complicated code: If you choose to edit Dawn’s code on your own, expect a complicated undertaking.

Some users like Goldi Kambale, a Twitter user who works in Shopify CRO, also point out that various brands who use it end up sharing a similar aesthetic:

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How to customize Dawn in the Shopify theme editor

Now that you have a better grasp of the Dawn theme, I’ll walk you through how you can customize it.

Accessing the theme editor

First, you’ll need to go to the theme editor through your Shopify admin. From there, simply choose the Online Store option, then select Themes.

Afterward, find the Dawn theme and click Customize to open the theme editor.

Editing page templates

You’re able to alter three components of your theme: Templates (Purple), Sections (Green), and Blocks (Blue).

We’ll start with Templates, which are the pages you can customize for your shop.

1. To access Templates, simply click the dropdown menu at the top.

2. Here, you can choose to make templates for your Home page, Product page, Collection pages, Blog posts, Cart, and more. Select your page, then click Create template.

Tip: This step will create a new page using the default template of the page type (product, collection, blog, etc). However, you can also just edit the default template for any page type.

3. Name your template something you can easily search (up to 25 characters), then click Create template.

4. Use the left sidebar to add sections, blocks, edit text, and more. Once you’re happy with the result, click Save in the upper right corner.

Repeat this process for every page you want to build new templates for. You can create new templates for Products, Collections, Pages, Blogs, and Blog Posts.

Other pages, such as the Home page, Collections list, Cart, and Checkout come with just a default templates, which you can customize directly in the theme editor.

An easy way to see which pages allow new templates and which don’t is by checking for the pull-out arrow beside each page name.

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Customizing sections

Your Dawn theme’s templates also contain sections, some of which are specific to the type of template you’re viewing.

For example, sections in your Home page template will differ from those in your Products template.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll cover the most common sections and show you how to add new ones.

Header and footer

Header and Footer sections are on every page of your Shopify store, and any changes you make will show up across all of them.

When editing a template, simply click Header or Footer on the left, then customize the following elements.

For Header

• Your logo position
• The navigation menu
• Spacing and section padding
• Sticky header preferences

For Footer

• Color scheme
• An email form
• Your displayed icons (for social media and payment methods)
• Country, region, and language selector

Adding new sections

Meanwhile, updates to other sections—like Image banner, Featured collection and Image with text—will only affect the specific template you’re editing, and each has unique characteristics.

Your choices aren’t limited to the ones I’ve mentioned, though. With Dawn, you can also add new sections like:

• Blog posts
• Collage
• Custom Liquid (which uses a template language created by Shopify)
• Collapsible content
• Featured product
• And more

To do so, simply click the Add section option and select a type. The new section will then pop up right above Footer.

You can move each section around and place them wherever you want by clicking and dragging the six-dot icon beside the name.

Tweaking your Shopify Dawn theme settings

The last aspect of customization involves adjusting Dawn’s theme settings. You can find them easily by clicking on Theme settings at the left of your editor.

Under theme settings, you can add your favicon image, brand colors for different CTAs and text, preferred typography for your copy, and more.

Shopify Dawn theme FAQs

To cap things off, I’ll answer some common questions about Shopify’s Dawn theme.

Is Dawn a good Shopify theme?

Yes, the Dawn theme is a solid choice for any Shopify store. Its features can improve a store’s performance, intuitiveness, and flexibility, making it a smart option for various types of businesses.

Is the Dawn theme free?

Yes, Dawn is a free-to-use theme you can find in Shopify’s theme store. It allows you to design and customize your ecommerce store without incurring any additional costs.

How do I get Dawn on Shopify?

To download the Dawn theme, simply visit Shopify’s theme store and search for “Dawn.” Once you find it, simply add it to your store and edit your theme with the theme editor.

What’s the difference between the Dawn and Sense themes?

Dawn and Sense are both Shopify Online Store 2.0 themes, but they have key differences:

1. Dawn focuses on providing a modern, versatile, and sleek design that maximizes visuals, performance, and the user experience.
2. Meanwhile, Sense aims to offer brighter aesthetics and clearer product understanding by allowing merchants to craft more comprehensive pages and descriptions.

The choice between the two depends on your brand’s specific needs and visual preferences.

Are paid Shopify themes worth it?

Paid Shopify themes usually provide more advanced features, customization options, and dedicated support.

However, they’re only worth the cost if you need more complex store components or design elements.

Free themes like Dawn generally offer the right flexibility and quality for most merchants. However, combining one with a page-building app’s added functionalities can help you maximize its potential.

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What’s the most popular Shopify theme?

The popularity of Shopify themes varies, since they each offer unique features and design options that cater to different merchant preferences.

Aside from Dawn, some of the most frequently adopted themes are:
1. Refresh
2. Craft
3. Sense
4. Spotlight
5. Origin

You may notice that they are all free themes.

This likely impacts their popularity, with a lower barrier to entry for merchants who want to get a store set up quickly at ‌minimal hassle and cost.

Dawn is a minimalistic but powerful Shopify theme

The Shopify Dawn theme presents merchants with an updated and higher-performing appearance for their online stores.

Its optimized and responsive design, as well as its visual appeal, produce beautiful, user-friendly websites.

It still has its limitations compared to paid themes, but its popularity among ecommerce sellers highlights its value in the Shopify ecosystem.

Dawn provides a solid foundation for your online store. With this intro to the Dawn theme guiding you, you’re well on your way to realizing its full capabilities for optimal store design.

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