I have an active running shopify store, I need to upgrade it to a new theme.
First need to add pages and products in the new theme in development phase which should only go into the new theme that I am working on to develop and should not disturb the existing store. When all the product and pages for the new development theme are done I would expect to publish it.
What would be the best approach to go with this?
As currently when I go to customize the other theme it doesn’t let me add specific products/ pages for that theme only.
2
Answers
Long story short, you can’t.
If you like products to be visible to a specific theme only you will need to create a separate dev store or create hidden product ( not visible to the Online Store channel ).
For the pages is not a big problem since if you don’t link ( and your search don’t look for pages as well ) to them it will be hard to someone to enter then.
This is a common issue – youre doing an overhaul but don’t want to disturb current business. Sure on Plus this is made easy ( If you are on plus, ask your MSM for a new dev shop and use the Transporter app ) but for non-plus stores, it can be a headache.
There’s no cut and dry answer but here are some ways to get the job done.
Main things are – your new content can be ‘live’ in Shopify but if there’s no where on site to link to it, its pretty safe unless someone guesses the url. then just make sure you add a band-aid so Google doesn’t index them. This can also be extended to your sites search, a bit more work there but 100% doable.
The last bits that are ‘always on’ like your navigation – that you map all out and hustle on. Or make a new nav with a new handle and use that.
Best of luck! Have done many massive overhauls of sites and product data all while the site is live, just need to use a little finesse to work around some of the things specific to Shopify.