What Happens to Experiences When You Change Shopify Themes?

If you're planning to update, publish, or switch Shopify themes while running experiences in Visually, it's important to understand how theme changes can affect your tests and personalization experiences.

Will Changing Themes Override Visually Experiences?

In most cases, no.

Visually experiences are delivered separately from your Shopify theme code, so changing or publishing a different theme will not automatically override or remove your Visually experiences.

However, theme updates can affect how experiences function if the underlying page structure changes.

When Can Theme Changes Affect Experiences?

Many Experiences rely on selectors to identify and modify specific elements on a page.

If a new theme:

• Changes the page structure
• Renames CSS classes or IDs
• Removes existing elements
• Introduces new layouts or components

then existing Experiences may no longer be able to find the elements they were designed to modify.

As a result, an experience may:

• Stop displaying altogether
• Display incorrectly
• Apply changes to the wrong element
• Require updates before it can run successfully

Best Practice: Review Experiences Before Publishing a New Theme

If you're preparing a theme update, we recommend reviewing any active experiences against the new theme before publishing it.

This helps ensure that:

• Experiences continue to render correctly
• Targeting rules still work as expected
• Tests remain accurate after the theme launch

Working With Draft Themes

If your or your developers are building or testing changes in a draft theme, make sure Visually is installed on that theme as well.

Once installed, the new theme can be selected and edited within the Visually Editor.

Should Developers Be Included in the Testing Process?

Preferably, especially when a theme update includes layout or structural changes.

Looping your developer into the testing process can help ensure that:

• Theme updates and experiments don't conflict with one another.
• Experiences are validated before the new theme goes live.
• Any required selector updates are identified early.