How to discover what an app changed in your Shopify theme

JSON-LD for SEO customers receive updates to the JSON-LD code for the life of their store. Typically I’ll push out updates a couple of times per month after reviewing and testing the changes.

But sometimes you might want to review what changes were made.

Or perhaps you use another app that has changed your theme and you want to know what exactly was changed.

Shopify’s theme editor keeps track of recent changes to your theme in a few ways.

First off it’ll add an icon next to any new files or files that have recently changed.

Second, if you open a file there’s a link to look at the last 20 older versions of the file. That should let you pick an old enough version to see what’s changed.

When you pick an older version the file will be automatically refreshed to show the older version. But it won’t be saved yet so you can easily review the past version.

Sometimes this is enough to see what changes an app has made.

With complex templates though, you might want to use what’s called a diff tool. A diff tool is a developer tool that shows the differences between two files.

Using a diff tool is too complex for me to cover here but if you’re familiar with how the "track changes" features work in Microsoft Office or Google Docs, it’s like an industrial grade version of that. A quick search for "web diff tool" should reveal a few free web-based options you can use.

Earlier this week I released an update for all JSON-LD for SEO customers so now they have more control over how their product availability is shown. This is the first in a sequence of updates to let stores better customize their structured data.

This will be especially important as Google Merchant Center relies on this data for Google Ads.

Today would be a good day to Install JSON-LD for SEO if you haven’t yet. Especially if you’re still relying on your theme for structured data.