What Is Shopify Canvas? Sidekick Now Edits Your Theme

On October 1, 2026, Shopify launched Canvas, a new place to design your online store by talking to Sidekick, its AI assistant. Instead of editing one page at a time, you see every template of your theme on one board and ask Sidekick to change it.

That is a big shift for anyone who has paid a developer to move a section. It also comes with trade-offs that Shopify spells out in its own help docs. This guide covers what Canvas does, how to try it without risking your live store, what it can't do yet, and where a page builder like PageFly, a Shopify app for building landing and product pages, still fits.

On this page

• What is Shopify Canvas?
• How Canvas changes your store
• How to try Canvas without touching your live theme
• What Canvas can't do yet
• Canvas vs a page builder: theme layer vs page layer
• Where PageFly fits next to Canvas
• Pick the tool per job

What is Shopify Canvas?

Shopify Canvas is a design workspace in the Shopify admin where you build or change your online store theme with Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant. It shows all your store's templates side by side, lets you click any part to edit it, and lets Sidekick make changes that go beyond a block's settings.

Here's the point of view we'll use for the rest of this guide: Canvas works on the theme layer. It changes the templates, styles and code that every page of your store shares. That is different from the page layer, where you build one campaign page, test it and measure it. Both layers matter, and the best tool for one is not always the best tool for the other.

What changed on October 1

Sidekick already made more than 25 million edits to themes in the first half of 2026, according to Shopify's Canvas announcement. Canvas gives that work a proper home. Sidekick now navigates your theme files, makes coordinated changes across them, checks its own code and reviews screenshots of the result before showing it to you.

Ben Sehl, Director of Product at Shopify and co-founder of Kotn, put the change this way in the same announcement: "When I built Kotn 12 years ago, I knew how to code and it still took me two weeks to get a rough store working. Today, an entrepreneur on Shopify can build a fully custom store in twenty minutes."

Source: Shopify on YouTube — "Introducing Canvas", the official launch video.

If you've read our Shopify Sidekick review, this is the step that review was waiting for: Sidekick moving from giving advice to editing your storefront, one more step toward agentic commerce on Shopify.

Merchants were already moving this way

Merchants are searching less for how to customize a theme by hand and more for the assistant that does it for them. Canvas is Shopify answering that shift inside the admin.

How Canvas changes your store

Canvas gives you four ways to change a theme, according to Shopify's guide to customizing themes in Canvas:

• Ask Sidekick. Type a change in the Work with Sidekick field. Select a block first if you want the change to apply only there.
• Change a block's settings. Click a block in the preview and its most-used settings appear first.
• Edit text in the preview. Click the text and type. On some older themes this doesn't work, so you use the block's settings instead.
• Change theme settings. Colors and typography that apply across the whole theme.

The preview is your real theme running real code, not a mockup. You can switch between desktop, tablet and mobile widths, preview a different product or collection, and browse with the inspector off to see the store as a shopper would.

Two details worth knowing before you start

• There is no Save button. Canvas saves every change automatically. Publish doesn't save your work; it makes your changes visible to customers. On your live theme, the button reads Update instead.
• Undo doesn't reach Sidekick's changes. When Sidekick makes a change, your undo history is cleared. To reverse it, ask Sidekick to change it back or restore an earlier version from theme history.

That second point is the one that will catch people out. Get into the habit of checking theme history before you ask for a big change, so you know which version to go back to.

How to try Canvas without touching your live theme

The safest way to test Canvas is on a copy. When you duplicate a supported theme in Canvas, the original stays in your theme library and you keep editing it in the classic Shopify theme editor. The two themes are separate from then on.

1. Check that your store qualifies. You need a desktop browser, a plan that includes theme customization, the Online store › Themes › Edit code staff permission, and a theme made by Shopify (such as Dawn or Horizon) or a custom theme. Not sure who made yours? Run it through our Shopify theme detector.
2. Look for Canvas on your Themes page. Go to Online Store. If Canvas has reached your store, you'll see a New button and a Duplicate in Canvas option in the menu next to a supported theme.

3. Duplicate your theme in Canvas. Click the menu next to the theme, then Duplicate in Canvas. The copy opens in Canvas and gets a Canvas badge in your theme library. (Starting from scratch? Click New and describe your brand to Sidekick instead.)
4. Ask for one change at a time. For example, on your product page: "Make the image gallery full width on desktop and add a size guide link under the price." Review the result before the next request.
5. Check every important template. Open your home page, a product, a collection and the cart in full-screen preview. Switch to mobile width each time.
6. Check your apps in the preview. Make sure your reviews, upsells and any other app features still appear. Canvas can't add or configure app blocks or app embeds, so anything missing here has to be solved before you publish.
7. Publish, or walk away. When the copy is ready, click Publish in the top bar and review the change list. If it isn't ready, leave it as a draft. Your live theme hasn't changed.

If the theme can't be published, Canvas lists the errors and offers a Fix with Sidekick button. And if a published change turns out wrong, theme history lets you restore an earlier version and publish that instead.

What Canvas can't do yet

Shopify is clear that Canvas is early. It is "not replacing the existing editor yet", and the requirements and considerations page lists the limits. Here they are with what each one means for a store.

Shopify told theme developers there is "not yet full backwards compatibility" with third-party themes and that it is working on it, in its developer community post. Expect this table to shrink. Until it does, the theme-update trade-off is the one to weigh hardest: once you edit a theme in Canvas, you own every future fix, the same trade-off we found when we tested vibe coding a Shopify store.

Canvas vs a page builder: theme layer vs page layer

Canvas and a Shopify page builder overlap less than they first seem to. One reshapes the theme every page shares. The other builds individual pages that sit on top of that theme. Here is how they compare on the jobs merchants actually ask about.

PageFly plan and rating facts are from the PageFly App Store listing, read on October 4, 2026: rated 4.9 from 5,897 reviews, with the Built for Shopify badge.

The honest summary: if your goal is "make the whole store look like us", try Canvas first. If your goal is "launch this offer by Friday and know whether it worked", that is a page job, like the single-offer Shopify landing pages we break down elsewhere. The Black Friday landing page templates we tested last month are a typical example.

Where PageFly fits next to Canvas

We want to be precise here, because this is our own product. PageFly pages rely on the PageFly Theme Extension, an app embed you turn on in your theme, as the PageFly help center explains. Canvas can't add or configure app embeds. We haven't been able to test a Canvas-edited theme yet, because Canvas hasn't reached our main or demo store yet. So we don't know yet whether an embed you turned on before duplicating carries over to the Canvas copy.

Until we've tested it, here is the setup we'd recommend:

• Keep your PageFly pages on a theme you edit in the classic theme editor. That's your current live theme, so nothing changes for your existing pages.
• Experiment with Canvas on a duplicate. Before you publish it, open your PageFly pages in its preview and check they render.
• If something is missing, don't publish the Canvas copy. Your live theme and pages stay exactly as they were.

We'll update this section with first-hand results as soon as Canvas reaches our stores.

You can already ask Sidekick for a PageFly page

Canvas teaches merchants to describe what they want and let AI build it, the same idea behind Claude Design to Shopify. PageFly works the same way inside Sidekick in your admin. With PageFly installed, ask Sidekick "Create a landing page for this product with PageFly", and it writes a brief and opens PageFly's editor to build the page, unpublished. Sidekick can also list your PageFly pages and report their health scores and A/B test results.

1. Open Sidekick in your Shopify admin. Click the Sidekick icon in the top bar.
2. Ask for a PageFly page in plain words. The first time, Sidekick asks your permission to access PageFly data.
3. Review the page in the PageFly visual editor, then publish it yourself. Building pages uses AI credits, the same as FlyMate.

The full walkthrough, with every screen, is in PageFly in Shopify Sidekick. Prefer to stay inside PageFly? The AI Page Builder builds a page from a text prompt with FlyMate AI.

What a page builder adds after the page is live

Canvas gets your store looking right. What it doesn't do is tell you whether a page converts. That is where the page layer earns its keep:

• Test before you guess. Run A/B tests on Shopify pages and keep the winner.
• See what shoppers do. Heatmaps show where visitors click and how far they scroll.
• Find what to fix. The CRO Center flags issues on a page and suggests changes.

Pick the tool per job

Canvas is a real step forward, and you don't have to choose sides. Match the tool to the job:

• Use Canvas when you're on a Shopify-made or custom theme, you want a store-wide refresh without a developer, you sell in one main market, and you accept owning a theme that no longer updates.
• Use a page builder like PageFly when you're on a third-party theme, you need campaign or landing pages fast, you want to A/B test, you sell across several markets, or you want your theme to keep receiving updates.
• Use both when you restyle the theme in Canvas and run campaign pages on top. Check that your pages work on the Canvas copy before you publish it.

Not sure where to start? Duplicate your theme in Canvas when it reaches your store, and build one campaign page in PageFly on your current theme this week. Compare how long each took and what each changed. That tells you more than any review, ours included. For a broader view of building a store, see our Shopify website builder guide.