Installation

Getting Signal onto a store takes a couple of minutes. Getting it to look like the demo takes longer — that’s the Quick start. This page covers the upload.

Prerequisites

• An active Shopify store on any plan. Signal uses Online Store 2.0, which every plan supports.
• Admin access, or staff access with the Manage themes permission.
• The Signal theme ZIP from your purchase.

Caution

Don’t unzip the file before uploading. Shopify expects the archive, with layout/, sections/, blocks/, snippets/, templates/, config/, assets/ and locales/ at its top level. Re-zipping a folder on macOS often nests everything one level deeper, and Shopify rejects that.

Method 1 — upload through Shopify admin

The right path for almost everyone.

1. Sign in to your Shopify admin.

2. Go to Online Store → Themes.

3. In the Theme library, click “Add theme” → “Upload zip file”.

4. Choose the Signal ZIP from your computer.

5. Wait for the upload to finish. Shopify validates the theme and indexes its sections and blocks — usually well under a minute.

6. Click “Customize” to start setting it up, or Actions → Publish when you’re ready for it to be the live theme.

Tip

Set Signal up as an unpublished theme and preview it before publishing. The demo content references collections, products and images that don’t exist on your store, so the first hour looks worse before it looks better — much more comfortable on a hidden theme than on your storefront.

Method 2 — push with the Shopify CLI

For developers working from a local copy of the theme.

Preview locally

# from inside the theme directory
shopify theme dev --store your-store.myshopify.com

This serves your local files at a preview URL and hot-reloads as you edit. Nothing is written to the store.

Upload as a new theme

shopify theme push --store your-store.myshopify.com --unpublished

Creates a new unpublished theme from your local files. Drop --unpublished and the CLI will ask which theme to overwrite.

Check for problems

shopify theme check

Signal is set up for theme-check:recommended (see .theme-check.yml). Run this after any code change you make yourself.

What you’ll see immediately after install

Signal ships with a configured demo. On a store that isn’t the demo store, expect:

• The homepage mostly renders, because most sections carry their own copy and images as settings. Images stored as shopify://shop_images/... references won’t resolve, so those sections show an empty plate.
• Three sections look empty until you point them at real content: the Product mosaic and Product rail need a collection, and Dispatch needs a blog.
• The header and footer menus fall back to whatever menus exist on your store with the handles main-menu and footer.
• The nine page templates (about, lookbook, size guide, stockists, shipping, FAQ, contact, wishlist) exist but aren’t reachable — no page uses them yet. See Pages and templates.

None of that is a fault; it’s a theme waiting for your catalog.

Post-install checklist

1. Note the version

Online Store → Themes lists the theme name and version against the Signal entry. Worth having to hand when you contact support — the version is declared as theme_version in config/settings_schema.json.

2. Brand and type

Upload your logo and favicon, set your brand name, and choose your heading and body fonts in theme settings.

3. Colors

Repoint the seven theme colors — page background, deeper plane, inverted plane, accent, tile, hairline and muted text. The accent is the one to get right first.

4. Menus

Build your menus under Content → Menus, then wire them up per Navigation and menus.

5. Pages

Create the pages the preset templates expect and assign each template. See Pages and templates.

6. Demo content

Replace demo copy, images, collections and the featured products in the mega menu promo. See Demo content.

Updating to a newer version

Shopify has no in-place theme update, so treat an update as a new theme:

1. Duplicate your live theme (Actions → Duplicate). This is your rollback.

2. Upload the new ZIP as a separate theme — never overwrite the live one.

3. Re-enter your settings on the new theme. Settings don’t carry across uploads. Screenshot your settings panels first, or copy config/settings_data.json across if you’re comfortable editing theme files.

4. Preview and test the new theme end to end, including a test checkout.

5. Publish when you’re satisfied, and keep the duplicate for a week or two.

Caution

If you’ve edited theme files yourself, those edits live only in your copy. An update replaces every file, so keep your changes in version control or in a written list — otherwise reapplying them is archaeology.

Next step

Work through the Quick start.