"i only speak liquid" #79: When to throw out the theme

Written by Elisa (a Storetasker Expert)

Author

Elisa Ellis
July 09, 2025

Hey everyone,

This is Elisa’s 3rd edit of “i_only_speak_liquid”:

Elisa is a 14-year e-commerce vet who’s worked with a bunch of DTC brands as a freelancer, full-time employee, and agency dev.

She’s passionate about taking old things and making them better, so she loves working with brands with chaotic old codebases to build new features and improve site speed.

Ofc: She’s an expert on Storetasker 😉 apply here.

Let’s dive in 🤿

What I’ve been thinking about:

When should you throw out your theme?

I recently worked with a client who had a bad theme.

None of his settings were connected. Half his sections were broken and the other half didn’t do what he needed. Something as simple as promoting a holiday sale was a nightmare. He didn’t have a huge budget; he just needed something that worked.

There are a million reasons a brand might have a terrible theme. Sometimes they’ve had a million different freelancers building features here or there over the years, or app developers making changes to their theme that don’t get removed when the app is, or an agency that made a weird decision early on or a thousand other things that aren’t really anyone’s fault - they just happened.

Point is, bad themes happen. There are only two ways of dealing with them. Option one - fixing the theme. Option two - throwing everything out and starting over.

For a long time, my recommendation was always to fix the existing theme. This lets the client set the pace of updates based on their timeline and budget. There’s no risk of missing a key integration or accidentally breaking a marketing pixel. They don’t need to learn to use new settings or features or migrate specially formatted content over to custom metafields and metaobjects.

Then I worked with Mr. Bad Theme. It was the first time I strongly encouraged a client to start over using a theme store theme without a second thought - and for him, it was a game changer.

It got me thinking about what made it such a huge win for him:

  1. His goal was to be able to make simple content updates without a developer.

  2. He had limited templates and content that needed to be migrated to the new theme.

  3. The next big holiday for his brand was far enough out that there was time to get everything up and running well in advance.

  4. He didn’t have any complex custom features. Things I look out for are bundling, specialty promotions (like a gift with purchase in the cart), gated products, quantity limits, or anything that’s not immediately clear what it does.

  5. There wasn’t a lot of design customization outside fonts and brand patterns, so it was easy to keep the brand consistent while giving it a little more polish.

  6. He was the sole business owner. There was no larger organization he folded up under or history of the site he was missing; if he didn’t know about it, it wasn’t being used.

  7. He had a realistic budget for what he needed. In this case, his budget was tight, but his needs were so straight forward that a fresh theme could do everything he wanted out of the box - he just needed the labor to get it set up.

So ultimately, it aligned with his longterm goals, budget, and timeline. I was able to make a really great recommendation for his needs instead of investing a ton of time in something that was never going to be perfect for him.

1 app I like:

Matrixify: When you’re looking to bulk update products so you can add filters or custom metafields, Matrixify is a lifesaver.

One learning as a freelancer:

I used to think starting from scratch was the hallmark of good work. People are paying me to code, so I should be coding. Now I understand that it doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel every time you build a carriage.

If my client has the budget for a fully-customized theme built exactly to their brand’s specifications, that’s incredible - I love giving it to them. But with sections and section groups and now theme blocks, my smaller clients can have more theme customization options than ever before - and I get to help them figure out how to get the best site within their limitations - whether I’m coding some of it, all of it, or nothing at all.