How your Rich Snippets are impacted when you switch Shopify themes

Changing your Shopify store’s theme is one way to quickly refresh its look and feel.

But it can come with a lot of risks, especially to your SEO and Rich Snippets.

Shopify themes usually come with microdata. Microdata is structured data about your store and products that is embedded in the HTML code.

When you change your theme you’re also changing all of the microdata.

Sometimes that’ll be okay. Even though the themes might look and behave differently, you could be lucky and their microdata is mostly the same.

Other times, you won’t be so lucky.

The quality and type of microdata support vary wildly in themes.

Maybe your theme change improves your microdata. Maybe it makes it worse.

However the microdata ends up, you should be careful if you depend on your theme for your store’s structured data. Otherwise you might lose any search enhancements and rich snippets your store has built up.

You also need to be careful if the theme changes how your product pages are linked. If one uses the collection/product style and the other theme uses the product style, you might cause Google to re-index your entire catalog. This can cause you to lose your traffic and Rich Snippets.

If you use JSON-LD for SEO, you should be safe. Since it exports your structured data separately from your theme, all you need to do is to email me when you change your theme and I’ll re-run its installer.