Practical Ecommerce Merchant

Jan. 29, 2025

Plain-English Guide to Shopify Liquid

Liquid is Shopify’s template engine that brings backend store data to the public-facing front-end. Merchants who understand Liquid can unlock new store customizations without needing a developer.

In this article, I will explain the basics.

Liquid is a bridge between a store’s content and how it’s displayed. The template resides in a file with the .liquid suffix for every page or section. Hence main-product.liquid contains the product template.

Shopify organizes files based on what they do. For example, the “sections” folder contains files defining entire parts of a site, such as headers or a product gallery. The “snippets” folder applies to smaller components, such as buttons or a specific design element.

Snippets can reside in section folders. A merchant could create a custom button in a snippet file and include it in the section folder, for example. To place “snippet_name.liquid” inside “main-product.liquid,” I would position my cursor at the right point in the product file and add "% render ‘snippet_name’ %" in brackets.

Liquid functions with defined terms and phrases — a syntax.

Variables are the representation of dynamic information. For example, product.title dynamically displays the title of the product. Note how Liquid uses double curly braces to pull the variable information.

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