[P] Using sections responsibly

Our theme, Prestige, offers nearly 30 sections that you can use to create rich, sophisticated pages. With great power comes great responsibility, though. This tutorial will guide you through best practices for using our themes.

Do not use too many sections

It might be tempting to add a lot of sections to your pages. We, however, recommend limiting the number of sections to 10-15 on a given page. This has the following benefits:

Improved performance: the more sections you add, the more time it takes for Shopify to generate the page for your customers. By limiting the number of sections, you can help your store to load fast.
Improved focus: with too many sections, your customers might feel overwhelmed with content. By using fewer sections, you can help your customers understand your products better, ultimately leading to increased conversions.
Easier maintenance: limiting the number of sections on a page can help you maintain your store more easily. You have less content to write, so you can focus on what matters most.
Better SEO: instead of cramming as much content as possible on a home page, try to split the content into smaller, more focused pages. For instance, instead of having sections about your brand on your home page, create a dedicated "About Us" page with its own sections. This will help to spread your content to different pages and improve your organic SEO.

Understanding limits

Limits can always feel frustrating. You do not want the platform to limit your creativity. However, limits are often here for a reason. We have over ten years of experience in e-commerce, and while each business is different, we have accumulated a lot of feedback on what works.

Here are some limits you might come across:

Limit of 25 sections: Shopify limits the number of unique sections to 25. This limit is mostly here for performance reasons. If you need more than 25 sections, you should reconsider your store structure, as there might be a better way to achieve what you want (refer to the "Do not use too many sections" part).
Limit of blocks: we voluntarily introduce, in some sections, a limit on the number of blocks. For instance, we do not allow you to add more than six slides to a slideshow section. This limit protects you from doing things detrimental to user experience (studies show that very few customers will see the slides beyond the third one, which is a lost marketing opportunity).
Limit of navigation: Shopify supports up to 3 levels of nested menu. This is a limit that can't be increased, which is based on best user experience practice. If you need more levels, you should reconsider your menu structure to make it more easily discoverable by your customers.

Do not fight the theme

Prestige has been designed and developed by a team of e-commerce veterans with over ten years of experience. If things have been done a given way, this is for a reason.

While some design elements or features might not match your requirements, we highly encourage you to give it a try. It might work better than you anticipated.

Remember that you should avoid making changes without actually measuring them (for instance by using analytics or actual user feedback). You should only consider changes and deviate from what the theme has done when you have measured and found an actual pain point from your customers.

If you have identified such problems, you can then consider hiring a developer to help you.

Remember the limits of a theme

Finally, keep in mind that a theme is not a fit-all solution. A theme is designed to answer 90% of the problems. It will never be a replacement for a tailored-fit theme that has been thought, designed, and developed just for your brand.

Each merchant has different needs, and trying to include every possible use case into a theme would end up with confusing, hard to set up theme settings.

We, therefore, recommend you embrace the theme and the decisions we took for you rather than trying to fight with it.