The world’s most popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify provide their users with the power to develop flexible and scalable solutions that meet the changing needs of their customers. The reason for this extraordinary flexibility of Shopify is due to Liquid, which is the open-source template language that powers Shopify templates and customizations. Liquid allows you to create customized theme templates for your business that provide your customers with unique shopping experiences and give you complete control over how your merchandise is displayed. Mastering Liquid gives you the ability to take full advantage of the capabilities available through the Shopify ecommerce platform.
Liquid provides a bridge between static template pages and dynamic ecommerce content by enabling you to create templates that allow you to display product information, collections, and customer data in a successfully structured and clean codebase. The best ways to customize your Shopify theme or templates will be outlined in this account following best practices, tips, and techniques for leveraging Liquid to its full extent.
What Is Liquid and Why It Matters for Shopify?
For those who are not familiar with the term Liquid and how it relates to the Shopify ecommerce platform, Liquid was developed by Shopify to support dynamic content loading within storefronts. Rather than using traditional programming construct conventions to manage dynamic content loading, Liquid uses objects, tags, and filters to control the rendering of dynamic content. In this manner, Liquid enables developers to work securely with dynamic ecommerce data without exposing sensitive information.
1. Understand the Core Building Blocks of Liquid
Three key elements you need to learn in order to understand Liquid:
Objects Liquid
Liquid Objects are the format of all of your dynamic content, including your products, collections, and blogs, and are displayed with double curly braces.
Tags Liquid
Liquid Tags allow you to control execution of logic through loops, if then style logic, etc. Liquid Tags are responsible for defining the structure and flow of your Liquid Templates.
Filters Liquid
Liquid Filters are used to change how you will see your Liquid data. For example, changing how dates are formatted, how strings are manipulated or changed, and how numbers are altered.
Having a basic understanding of how to interact with Liquid will enable you to customize your template with great flexibility and performance.
2. Have a well-structured Theme
Shopify themes typically consist of many Liquid files, including homepage templates, product templates, collection templates, section templates, and snippet templates. By having a clean theme structure, you will be able to scale your theme and maintain it more easily.
Good design practices for creating and maintaining your Liquid theme:
- Name your custom sections clearly.
- Break your large templates into smaller snippets.
- Never duplicate code; use Snippets where possible.
- Make sure to have a clear folder structure for better debugging.
If you have an organized theme, you will write faster and debug your theme faster as well
3. Dynamic Sections and Blocks for Maximum Flexibility
The addition of dynamic sections and blocks is the biggest impact from the launch of Shopify Online Store 2.0 on customisation. It has enabled store owners to take customisation to the next level. By using Liquid, store owners can define how each section behaves and the type of content the user can edit from the theme editor.
Sections allow a store owner to:
- Add or remove content quickly and easily
- Visually rearrange layouts
- Customise content without having to modify code
Blocks are an extension of sections that allow multiple types of content within a single section, providing greater control over content management.
The use of Liquid for creating flexible, modular and user-friendly themes is essential.
4. Using Filters for Content Output Enhancement
Filters are an incredibly powerful tool in Liquid that allow developers to transform data. Filters are commonly used to format numbers, truncate strings, and convert text to lower or upper case, etc…
Although you won’t see the code, you should remember that by using filters correctly, you can:
- Improve the readability of content
- Improve the visual cleanliness of web pages
- Create consistent formatting for content across all web pages
- Enhance the design of the web page with minimal effort.
Correctly using filters will help ensure that themes maintain a polished and professional appearance.
5. Reduce Performance Impact through Liquid Loop Reduction
Liquid loops enable a developer to iterate over lists of items, such as blog posts or products. While loops are useful, excessive use of loops can significantly slow down the performance of your theme.
- Avoid nesting too many loops
- Limit the number of items rendered
- Use pagination for large lists
- Cache repeated content using section settings or variables
6. Take Advantage of Liquid Conditionals for Personalization
Theme personalization based on user behavior/shop data can be created using liquid conditionals to build theme functionality that is adaptive in nature. Unique User Experiences can be created, including:
- The ability to show different content based on whether or not the user is logged in
- The ability to show targeted promotions
- The ability to indicate low-than-normal inventory levels as a general alert
- The ability to show an alternate message when a particular item is sold out
The use of Smart Conditional Logic will help to increase conversion and have a positive impact on user engagement.
7. Reuse Snippets to Create Cleaner and More Scalable Theme Designs
With Liquid, it’s easy to create reusable snippets of code that you can use multiple times across multiple templates, rather than duplicating the code each time. This greatly reduces the potential for errors and allows for an easier way to maintain your theme.
You can benefit from reusing snippets if:
- You need access to product cards in several different locations
- Create reusable CTA blocks
- Have consistent layouts
- Reduce the amount of duplicated code
- Long term scalability requires clean code.
8. Use Global Objects Effectively Within Shopify
Shopify has created a number of Global Objects including:
- Shop
- Cart
- Customer
- Collections
- Products
By utilizing Shopify’s global objects, one will have immediate access to the most important data for your store allowing you to easily create more advanced customization with no added setup on the back end.
Correct usage of Global Objects will assist in building Dynamic Pages, which will automatically update to reflect changes made to your store’s data as it’s created.
9. Safe Ways to Test & Preview Theme Modifications
Before releasing your Liquid changes to your theme, use Shopify’s Theme Preview and Draft to test your modifications. Preview the changes before you go live.
Before going live, be sure to preview your changes to your:
- Product Templates
- Shopping Cart
- Checkout Experience
- Navigation Menus
This stops your store from having any broken layouts, etc.
10. Adhere to Shopify’s Guidelines on Coding and the Best Practices
To ensure that your theme runs properly, you should follow these guidelines:
- Your Liquid Templates Should Be As Clean And Minimal As Possible
- Do Not Put Extensive Logic In The Templates
- Use Schema Settings To Allow Store Owners To Have More Control
- Make Sure Your Theme Can Be Accessed By Customers Both For SEO And For Accessibility.
By Enforcing Shopify’s Best Practices, You Will Maximize The Ability of Your Customization To Remain Compatible With Shopify’s Future Updates.
Conclusion
By understanding the core elements of Liquid, the proper usage of sections and snippets, optimizing the speed of your customized theme, and following Shopify’s Best Practices, you will have created a visually appealing, SEO friendly, and capable of converting visitors to customers, Shopify store.
By mastering Liquid, you will not only be a better developer, but you will also improve the overall shopping experiences of your customers.
