Our approach to section/block structure

Some history

In the beginning, there were Online Store 1.0 themes.

Merchants had no control over page structure, other than a few hacks devised by theme developers. One list of settings covered your entire site.

Sections and Blocks were introduced in 2016. Now merchants could restructure the home page however they wanted to, using a visual theme editor.

In 2021, JSON templates were introduced - allowing Sections to appear on any template. This era was called Online Store 2.0. Over time, themes introduced full section configuration to most page templates.

2023 brought Section Groups. This allowed a theme to group sections at the layout-level. Add a row of icons to the top of your Footer Group and it will show in the footer of every page across your store.

In 2025, Nested Theme Blocks were introduced. The new Nested Theme Blocks (called just Theme Blocks in Shopify documentation) can be used across a site in different Sections, or even inside other Blocks. A theme can use a mix of both, or neither, it's up to the theme. Conditional Settings were also introduced, which has an effect on how Sections and Blocks are configured.

Shopify also launched a new theme in Summer 2025 Editions - Horizon (with a number of variants of the theme). The Horizon theme was built 'Theme Blocks first' - with much of the content composed of very small specialised Blocks.

Now

Our themes all feature:

• Sections on almost every template, and Blocks in sections where content repeats (e.g. columns, testimonials)
• Section Groups* for Header, Footer, and Overlay (e.g. Pop-ups)

*Section Groups are on the roadmap for Showcase.

With Shopify's introduction of Horizon, and its Blocks-first approach, some may wonder if all themes will eventually be built the same way.

As this is entirely optional functionality, we ask ourselves: "Is this better?"

Our priority is to help merchants get up and running as fast as possible, and make it easy to make great-looking content; this usually means reducing the number of choices to only the ones that we think make sense, and result in great-looking output.

At the moment, we believe the structure we have is the most effective at this task, and do not intend to rebuild any of our themes in a fully Nested-Blocks fashion. That said, we may incorporate Theme Blocks in specific Sections or Templates where a solid improvement of the setup experience is clear.