How to Build with Shopify’s Horizon Theme Framework: A Guide for Developers and Designers

Everyone is talking about the Shopify Horizon theme framework right now – and it’s easy to see why. This isn’t just another “Dawn update”. It’s part of a massive change to the Shopify ecosystem – one that revolves around AI, and more intuitive storefront design.

Here’s the scoop. In Shopify’s Summer ’25 Edition, Horizon was launched as a new theme foundation, made to be modular, fast, and surprisingly simple, even for non-developers. From what I’ve seen, the built-in AI theme and block generation isn’t just a gimmick, it genuinely helps teams launch polished stores in days, often saving thousands in web design costs.

The truth is, merchants have long been frustrated with slow performance or stale UX, and Horizon directly addresses those issues with fresh design tools and intelligent structure.

Whether you’re a Shopify expert looking to upgrade your theme design services, or a business leader eager to take advantage of Horizon (maybe with a little help from a freelancer), I’m about to tell you everything you need to know about this theme phenomenon.

What Is the Shopify Horizon Theme Framework?

Shopify updates its platform and theme collection all the time. Usually, it doesn’t feel like that much of a big deal. But the Shopify Horizon framework is different.

Instead of layering features on Dawn or boosting Online Store 2.0, Shopify built an entirely new modular foundation meant for today’s standards. It delivers:

• A visually powered drag-and-drop system built for pixel-perfect control
• Better SEO and performance via optimized component structure
• A consistent architecture across various store use cases

If you’ve ever struggled with Dawn’s flat blocks, messy Liquid, or performance hacks—Horizon represents a more mature next step. Plus, it’s free, already baked into Shopify’s official Summer 2025 Edition, and available in the theme library right now.

Block-Based Structure (Modular Design, Zero Code)

Shopify took inspiration from Webflow, Squarespace, and other modern builders, and brought that same flexibility right into their core themes.

Every Shopify Horizon theme is built around a fully modular block system. It’s not entirely new – Storefront 2.0 started this idea, but Horizon refines it into something way smoother and more intuitive.

What you can do that you couldn’t (or couldn’t easily) before:

• Move any block to any part of any page, not just the homepage
• Duplicate blocks or entire sections instantly, so if you’re running multiple promos or want to reuse layouts, you don’t need to rebuild them
• Hide or show content dynamically based on screen size or customer behavior
• Stack blocks however you want, mixing images, videos, reviews, and CTAs in any order
• Drag-and-drop entire layouts without triggering layout bugs or formatting headaches

This system means you’re no longer stuck with rigid templates. You get:

• Faster iteration on landing pages
• Cleaner product storytelling
• A store that doesn’t look like every other Shopify site

In other words, you finally have design freedom without developer dependency.

AI-Assisted Customization (Built Right In)

Shopify’s AI tools, like Magic, technically work with older themes. But Horizon is purpose-built to make AI genuinely useful, rather than just an add-on.

When you ask the editor to “Add a newsletter block under my product grid,” Horizon actually understands what you mean, because its blocks are structured to be AI-readable. That means:

• The system generates clean layouts that inherit your theme’s typography, spacing, and colors
• Blocks are positioned logically, respecting parent-child relationships
• You get fewer broken layouts and more consistent styling

I’ve tried generating blocks on both Dawn and Horizon, and it’s night and day. With Horizon, the AI output usually just works, and feels like a natural part of the design.

This matters if you:

• Want to hand off more control to your marketing team
• Need to launch new sections in hours instead of weeks
• Prefer spending your dev time on deeper customization rather than fixing broken AI snippets

Put simply, Shopify Horizon theme features were designed with AI in mind from day one. That alone makes it a smarter bet for the next few years.

Clean New Design Language

If you’ve used older themes, you know how clunky some of them looked—heavy typography, cramped spacing, dated icons. Horizon finally fixes that.

Out of the box, every Horizon theme feels cleaner, lighter, and more premium. Some of the improvements you’ll notice immediately:

• Sharper typography with better hierarchy
• More whitespace that makes pages feel breathable
• Polished microinteractions, like hover states and smooth transitions
• Responsive padding and margins for all devices

These upgrades make it easier for customers to focus on products and CTAs. Which, if you care about conversions, matters a lot.

Cleaner, Optimized Codebase

Under the hood, Horizon is faster and leaner. Here’s what’s improved:

• Updated Liquid logic with less bloat
• Smarter asset loading: only what you need gets rendered
• JSON templates structured to reduce render-blocking
• Cleaner separation of CSS and JavaScript

All of this means better scores on Core Web Vitals: especially First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive. That impacts:

• Your search rankings
• Your bounce rates
• Your mobile conversion rates

Theme-Wide Section Support (Finally Useful at Scale)

Technically, Online Store 2.0 let you put sections on any page. But if you’ve tried scaling it, you know how messy it could get, everything dumped into one long list of sections.

Horizon changes that:

• Sections are grouped by type (like Content, Media, Products, Promotions), making them easier to find.
• The layout and naming are more intuitive.
• You can reuse sections and templates safely, without accidentally breaking formatting.

Some Horizon themes (like Ritual and Fabric) even include pre-configured content templates you can mix and match. This is a big deal if you run multiple product lines or seasonal collections—it finally feels organized.

The Benefits of Shopify Horizon Themes

I’ve been working with Shopify since the days when you had to hack Liquid templates to do anything even slightly custom. The Horizon release honestly feels like the biggest leap forward since Online Store 2.0, and a lot of that comes down to the practical benefits it unlocks for developers and designers. Here are the biggest benefits:

Faster Store Performance: It doesn’t matter how beautiful a theme looks if it loads like a brick. Horizon was built to be lean by default with cleaner code, smarter resources, and modular loading. 

Deeply Nested Blocks: This is the single biggest architectural shift. Shopify Horizon theme features allow for up to eight nested levels of blocks, compared to the two-level limitation of Dawn. That translates into genuinely sophisticated layouts you can build visually in the editor.

Real AI Power: You can literally prompt AI to build things, like promotional banners, blog preview sections, or featured product grids, then edit them yourself. In practical terms, this cuts development time dramatically, especially when you need to mock up ideas quickly for a client.

Built-in Design Consistency: Every Horizon theme shares a core foundation. That means more predictable styling variables, reusable blocks, and consistent behavior across themes and devices. If you’ve ever jumped from one premium theme to another and spent days cleaning up the inconsistencies, you’ll appreciate this. 

Future-Proofing: This is a big one. Shopify has been clear that Horizon is the default going forward. If you’re investing in a new storefront now, it makes a lot more sense to start with a framework that will get the most updates, the most community support, and the best performance over time.

How to Build with the Horizon Theme Framework

This is the part I was most excited to get into, because I know from experience that nothing beats a clear, practical workflow. The good news is that you shouldn’t have to “learn Shopify” all over again to get started with Horizon themes. But you might need to change a few things.

Step 1: Start with the Basics

If you’re migrating a client’s store to the Horizon theme framework, you’ll probably already know that you’ll have to do some prep work. That generally means:

• Backing up the current theme, so you can roll back to it if necessary.
• Auditing installed apps (and making sure they work with the new theme structure).
• Planning any major theme changes. 

If you’re just experimenting with Horizon themes, I’d recommend spinning up a development store on your Shopify Partner dashboard. That’ll let you install various themes (and compare them), and safely experiment without risking a live storefront.

Step 2: Choose Your Base Theme

There are a handful of different options to choose from. Honestly, the best bet is to install a few from the theme store and compare them side by side. Some of my favorites include:

• Horizon: Horizon is the flagship starter theme Shopify features in most Horizon demos. It combines a clean, airy layout with thoughtful defaults that work for nearly any catalog size. If you need something versatile and high-performing right out of the box, Horizon is a smart default. It’s the easiest theme to customize without feeling locked into a specific aesthetic.
• Fabric: Built around big images, Fabric is bold and modern. It’s great for highly visual sellers who want to draw attention to product images of things like furniture or clothes. If you’re looking for a pretty contemporary option, Fabric is a good pick. Ritual is pretty similar, though, if you’re building for a lifestyle brand. 
• Tinker: Tinker brings a lively, modular design that highlights promotional elements and interactive blocks. It has just enough built-in flair to avoid a generic feel, yet remains easy to customize without touching code.

Play around a little. Remember, all Horizon themes share the same framework, so you’re not locked into a single choice.

Step 3: Explore the Theme Editor

Once installed, open the Theme Editor and spend an hour just clicking around. Pay special attention to:

• Nested sections: Try building a parent block with several nested content areas.
• AI prompts: Experiment with generating a new section from scratch.
• Color and typography presets: These are more granular than Dawn.

Pro tip: Use Preview Mode on mobile, since many Horizon design improvements shine on small screens.

Step 4: Customize the Schema

One of the biggest evolutions in Horizon is the extended schema JSON structure. While you can do most edits visually, you’ll sometimes want to:

• Add custom blocks with specific fields
• Reorder nested structures beyond what the UI allows

You can find schema files under:

/sections/

and

/blocks/

The syntax will look familiar if you’ve worked in Dawn, but you’ll see more depth in settings arrays and presets.

Step 5: Optimize for Performance

Before you publish anything, check performance:

• Use Shopify’s built-in Theme Check.
• Run your dev store through PageSpeed Insights.
• Watch for oversized images and unoptimized videos.

Horizon is designed to be fast, but it’s still up to you to keep your assets lean.

Step 6: Deploy and Test

When you’re satisfied, duplicate your theme as a backup, then publish. Don’t skip live testing:

• Add-to-cart flows
• Search and filtering
• Mobile navigation

Every Horizon theme ships with best practices, but in my experience, there’s no substitute for poking around like an end customer.

Common Challenges When Adopting Horizon

If you’re moving from a legacy theme, expect a bit of a learning curve with Horizon. But it’s worth it. Between the nested blocks, the AI tooling, and the performance improvements, Horizon feels like what a modern Shopify build should be.

Here are the sticking points I’ve personally run into (or seen colleagues run into) while working with Horizon so far:

1. Learning the New Nested Schema

On paper, having up to eight levels of nested blocks is fantastic. In practice, it means your JSON schema files can get long. Managing deeply nested configurations takes more planning up front. If you just start dragging in blocks without thinking about content hierarchy, you’ll end up with a mess.

Tip: Sketch out your sections and blocks on paper or in a Figma board first. Treat it like a site map, this makes the nesting logic much easier to follow later.

2. Merchant Overconfidence with AI Blocks

I’ve already seen this with two clients: Horizon’s AI block generator feels so effortless that merchants start thinking they don’t need dev help at all.

That’s fine until they break layouts by:

• Generating conflicting blocks
• Overloading pages with uncompressed images
• Removing schema settings by accident

Set clear guidelines with your clients. If you’re a freelancer or agency, offer a Horizon training session or a quick Loom walkthrough so they understand where the guardrails are.

3. App Compatibility

While most modern apps are updating to support Horizon, there’s still a lag. Especially if you rely on older apps for:

• Reviews
• Mega menus
• Custom product bundles

Some of them simply haven’t rebuilt their theme extensions to work cleanly with Horizon. Before you commit, list every critical app and check whether they officially support Horizon. Reach out to their support teams if it’s not obvious.

4. Time Investment to Re-Platform

Moving an established store to Horizon isn’t a flip-the-switch moment. Even though Shopify emphasizes Horizon’s simplicity, you’ll still need to:

• Re-map content into new sections
• Rebuild any heavily customized templates
• QA all theme settings

Depending on store complexity, budget at least 2–4 weeks for a clean migration.

Need Help Building with Horizon? Try Storetasker

One of the smartest moves you can make as a merchant or project lead is working with someone who has actually built with Horizon, someone who understands the architecture, the nesting logic, and how AI-generated blocks integrate with real design systems.

This is where Storetasker comes in. I’ve been part of the Storetasker network for years, and I can tell you why it’s a no-brainer for Horizon work:

• Vetted Developers: Storetasker screens every expert. You’re not gambling on an unproven freelancer who just watched a YouTube video about Horizon.
• Fast Matching to Specialists: Unlike big agencies that slot you into generic processes, Storetasker pairs you with a developer who has already shipped Horizon builds. That means no paying for someone to “learn on the job.”
• Flexibility: Whether you want a full re-platform or just need a one-off performance pass, you can find the right person without a bloated retainer. If you’re a freelancer yourself, it’s also the best way to get projects from merchants actively searching for Horizon skills.
• Proven Outcomes: In the first month after Horizon’s launch, I’ve already seen merchants on Storetasker hiring teams to migrate legacy Dawn themes and seeing faster load times plus improved UX.

If you’re serious about getting Horizon right, hiring through Storetasker just saves time, and often, money. You’ll avoid the agencies selling buzzwords and get straight to shipping.

Ready to dive in? Start your project today.