Top 5 Shopify Themes 2021

What’s up guys, welcome to the BitBranding Channel. Today we’re going to show you the top 5 Shopify Themes that we are currently using and are obsessed with, including one amazing theme that is not in the official Shopify theme store. So, make sure you stick around for all of that.

As always, before we get started we just want to say welcome to everyone new. My name is Christian Piñon and I am one of the co-founders here at BitBranding. 

We've been helping frustrated store owners since 2015 become more impactful store owners through tutorials, tactics and strategies. If you want to support our YouTube Channel, make sure to hit that subscribe button and turn on notifications.

Now with that out of the way, let’s get started.

So, we’re going to show you a few of the themes that we’re going to be talking about today. 

Motion Theme

The number one theme that we are obsessed with is Motion. Motion is by Archetype Themes. 

One of the main reasons why we love this theme is the smooth animations. Let’s take a look here by going into View Demo.

So let’s look at some of the automations. Right off the bat you’ll see that they have a video hero section at the very top. They have their logo and site navigation at the top. This just looks very clean. 

When you scroll down to view the products, you’ll see the animation they have set up for their collections. 

If you scroll down a little bit more, you’ll see something that looks like a video. This is not a video, it’s just animating some of those pictures. That is something called a kern burn where the images are slowly moving. 

You can see slight animation when you are looking at the collection list.

You can have videos for your products images instead of just an image. 

There are just more subtle animations all throughout the website. Archetype Themes does an excellent job with their themes so they are packed full of really good features. Motion gives you a very premium look and feel. If you have single products or just a smaller catalog of products, we would say that motion is one of our favorites for this type of site. You can also still use it if you have a larger catalog.

They also have, as one of their main features, Quick Product Filtering. This will allow the customers to filter through products by tags without necessarily having to load the page again. This helps to make things just a little bit quicker for your customer to view products.

Motion also supports looping videos instead of just product images. It’s super easy to use and there is a support team with Archetype Themes who are super amazing. Anytime that we have any problems, we send them a message and they’re very responsive.

Also with Archetype Themes, they have the ability to make custom pages. We’ve talked about this in previous blogs where you can fully customize other sections like the product page or an about page instead of just relying on Shopify’s backend stuff. You can create really cool pages for this.

So there you have number one, is Motion

Empire Theme

The second one on the list is Empire by Pixel Union. 

This is an amazing, sort of Amazon style Shopify Theme. It’s loaded with robust functionality to support large product catalogs and high volume stores. There are a few features to highlight.

The first is the live search. This lets you show search results and quick links for products. Let’s go into the demo to see how that looks. 

In the search bar here at the top, we’re just going to type in speaker. As you can see, as you are typing something in, it starts to give the customer some results for the products that you may have on your store. This won’t just show products, it’ll also show pages and posts, so they can also search for your blog posts or if you have an About page that mentions the word speaker, it should show up in the quick search results. 

Another really good feature that we’ve never seen on any other store is the Instagram inspired shopible images. You can do up to 5 quick shop hotspots. Instagram actually added this as part of their shopping experience. So on the website, these shop hotspots will have tags in the photos and if you hover over the tag, you’ll see the actual product that you want to highlight. This is very cool if you want to take lifestyle images and then for your people to just be able to shop those products. This could work for literally anything. If you’re a boutique for example, and you have a whole outfit, you can very quickly and easily and very sleekly, showcase those products for the customer to shop.

The other big thing here is advance product filtering. This allows your customer to filter by type, best seller, pricing, etc. Again, this is an Amazon inspired theme so they have a lot of the features that you would need for a big catalog of products. The theme overall is really good and really sleek. Again, Pixel Union is another one of those bigger template sellers on Shopify so their support is excellent.

Make sure that you stick around to the end of the blog because we are going to show you that one theme that not a lot of people talk about but it’s highly customizable, super easy to use, but it’s not on the Shopify Theme store.   

Impulse Theme

Our next theme is Impulse by, again, Archetype Themes. 

So similar to Motion, in the sense of customizable product pages, about pages, great support, etc, Impulse is for maybe a larger catalog store. 

We didn’t mention this earlier, but all of the Shopify themes inside the store have 3 styles. The styles you can always change back and forth. So if you’re purchasing one and you purchase the bold style, you can always switch it to clean or modern whenever you please in the actual theme section.

Impulse, just for bigger stores and stores that do a lot of promotions, this theme has a lot of things for that. It integrates very well with any sort of promotion on the footer. So, you can have a sort of a sticky promotion footer on your collection pages, you can have promotions. So if you’re the type of store that’s always running giveaways or different discounts or promotions, this theme is amazing for that. There’s a lot of spots and a lot of ways to promote that particular promotion because, all throughout the website, there’s little spots everywhere that you can add that information. It makes it just a little bit more robust.

Again, we love Impulse for those bigger catalog stores,so check it out if you have, say, more than 50 products. 

Ok, before we jump to the last two themes that we want to share with you today, we want to make mention of a previous video we did, “How To Increase Shopify Traffic With TikTok.” You can find that video here. It’s one of our latest Shopify tutorial series videos, so go check it out.

Turbo Theme

Coming in at number four, this is a very highly regarded theme, a lot of people know about this one. It’s called Turbo by Out Of The Sandbox. I believe Out Of The Sandbox used to be in the Shopify store, for some reason they’re not there anymore, they're on their own website. 

Now, these last two themes, they’re not in the Shopify store, so typically we would say that themes that are not on the Shopify store, try to stay away from them. You’ll see a lot of articles out there that showcase some of the top themes out there and a lot of them are not actually included in the theme store, which you should try to shy away from some of those. We did make the mistake one time of installing one from Envato Market. We bought one, it was super cheap but looked amazing and looked like it had a bunch of really good features but it was very very slow. It was bogged down with code, the support was terrible, the features inside were all over the place and unorganized, it was a nightmare. So, even though the pricing made it seem better, just try to shy away from themes that are outside of the Shopify theme store.

Now when it comes to Out Of The Sandbox, we would say the opposite. Turbo is probably one of the most well known because of the speed and performance. It is a little bit pricier than the previous three we’ve shown you, those were around $180, Turbo is $350. 

However, it is highly well known in the drop shipping community because of its speed. We also believe it has a ludicrous mode where it’s just way faster than normal, but it typically doesn’t work with certain apps and things, so just be careful with that. Overall though, if you want a fast site, and that’s one of the big things that you worry about, then Turbo is going to be one of the best and fastest and best performance out there. 

This one also has predictive search like we talked about with Empire, smart page preloading for ultra fast navigation. You can have CSS customization so they make it a little bit easier for you to customize different things. You also have mega menus which is sort of like big drop down menus that you see on some Shopify stores, you can add images and different things like that.

Here we have the two-speed setting, Ludicrous and Sport. Each mode is designed to keep your site running as quickly, but also as smoothly, as possible. 

This theme is great, K-Swiss is using them, so that should tell you something.

Check out the reviews, this theme is just amazing and super fast and gives you the best performance. 

Now, we wouldn’t say it’s the best style, but it still looks nice for a theme, and again, they do include all that customization. 

Flex Theme

Alright, last but not least, this is the theme that we’ve been referring to the whole blog, and it is called Flex, again by Out Of The Sandbox. 

This is the most configurable theme on the market. There’s nothing else like it and the price tag tells you why. This theme is $450, but this theme offers multiple layouts, multiple section options. 

You can easily add more customization with CSS. Out of the gate they actually give you 13 unique style variants to get you started whereas the other ones only gave you those 3 styles.

So, let’s take a quick look at the different style options. For any type of store out there, they probably have a layout that will just fit perfectly with that particular category whether it’s jewelry, cosmetics, furniture, shoes, boutiques, food items etc. This theme works for everything. 

They even have some animation. For example, the navigation menu or the footer.

You can put the logo where you want it, move the search button. The amount of customization per section is just never before seen on any other theme.

Just a little disclaimer, we haven’t necessarily used this but we’ve heard about it for a long time. 

We remember a couple of years ago when they were still in development and they were showcasing to us what would be coming out. It takes a few things from Turbo with the optimization and speed, which is important, but the biggest thing is that it’s so highly customizable. 

So if you’re looking for a particular store where you want your dreams to come true, then the Flex theme is going to be the one for you. It comes at a higher price range of $450, but if you care about how it looks, this is the actual theme for you.

All right, guys, thanks so much for reading. If you would like to watch our “How To” video on this subject, you can watch it here. We want to hear from you. What are some of your favorite themes? Obviously, these are just some of our favorites, these are not necessarily THE top themes out there, but we want to hear from you. What themes have you used that you absolutely loved? Leave us a comment on the video, give us some links, give us the reasons. 

Again, if you enjoyed the tutorial, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and hit the bell so that you don't miss out on any of the content we put out every single week. It also helps us by showing the algorithm monkeys to show this video to other people. All right, guys, we will see you next time. Take care.

‍