Using Shopify Liquid to Add or Edit a Collection Description

Want to use Shopify Liquid to edit a collection description?

Below, we’ll show you how.

Indeed, our guide goes over absolutely everything you might want to know about this topic. Specifically, we’ll address the following:

• What Is the Collection Description in Shopify?
• Editing the Collection Description in Your Theme Files using Liquid
• Editing a Collection Description in the Shopify Admin
• Importing and Editing a Collection Page in Shogun
• Adding Personalization to a Collection Page in Shogun

What Is the Collection Description in Shopify?

A collection description is a piece of text that’s displayed on a collection page, usually near the top of the page right below the title, in order to describe the products that fall within the collection or serve some similar purpose.

Shopify stores sometimes don’t feature any collection descriptions at all — it’s certainly not necessary for your store to function. But there are a few key benefits that you may be able to realize by including this small section on your site, such as:

• Stand out from the competition: As we just mentioned, a lot of stores don’t bother with collection descriptions. So, adding this feature allows you to set yourself apart, subtly reinforcing the impression that your brand goes the extra mile and takes care of the little details that others ignore.
• Promote particular products: Whether it’s a best-seller you’d like to highlight or a struggling item that you need to give a boost, you can use the space in your collection description to draw attention to specific products in the collection.
• Improve SEO: The more people who visit your collection page, the more sales you’ll be able to generate from it. Collection descriptions offer an opportunity to include any keywords that you may be targeting, potentially improving SEO and increasing the amount of traffic you receive from search engines.

For example, the meal supplement brand Huel uses the collection description for its “Bundles” page to promote two particular options, the Taster Bundle and the Bestseller Bundle. 

Editing the Collection Description in Your Theme Files using Liquid

Shopify makes it easy to access the underlying code of your storefront’s theme. The bulk of this code is written in Liquid, an open source template language that was developed by Shopify themselves back in 2006 (you’ll also find theme files written with CSS and JavaScript). 

While Shopify does offer a no-code editor for customizing your theme, sometimes the only way to get exactly what you want is to go in and make some changes to your Liquid files. But don’t worry, you certainly don’t need to be an expert web developer to pull this off. But to be clear–make sure you save a backup of your store that you can restore in case anything goes haywire with your theme after making any changes.

To get started making the edits, you must access your theme files first:

• Log in to your Shopify account and select the sales channel you want to customize in the left sidebar of the main control panel. 
• Open the “…” dropdown menu next to your store’s theme and select “Edit code” — this will open up Shopify’s code editor. 
• In the left side of the code editor, you’ll see the folders that contain all your theme files. In the “sections” folder, there should be a file called “featured-collection.liquid” or something similar (the exact name of this file will depend on which theme you’re using). Another helpful file for editing a collection description (as well as any other part of your Shopify store) is “theme.liquid”, which is found in the “layout” folder and governs how your entire theme is rendered.

The particular files that you need to access and change will depend on what kind of edit you’re trying to implement for your collection description. 

For example, on Shopify’s default Dawn theme, you’ll notice that the collection description doesn’t go all the way across the page. It stops about two-thirds the way through.

There’s no way to change this through Shopify’s no-code theme editor, but you can make the edit with Liquid. 

Just open your theme files and go to “theme.liquid”. Then, anywhere above the “</body>” tag, add the following code:

<style>

 .collection-hero  .collection-hero__title+.collection-hero__description{

       max-width: 100% !important;

   }

</style>

Once you save your changes, you’ll now see that the collection description goes all the way across the page on the live version of your site. 

Of course, this is just one example of the many different ways that you could customize your collection page with Liquid. For more information about how to custom-code solutions for your Shopify store, check out our Liquid tutorial.

Editing a Collection Description in the Shopify Admin

As mentioned above, you can always use Shopify’s no-code theme editor to customize the styling of your collection description:

• Select the sales channel that you would like to customize in the left sidebar of the main Shopify control panel. 
• Click on the “Customize” button next to your theme — this will open up Shopify’s theme editor. 
• Use the dropdown menu located near the top of the page to select which collection template you want to edit. 
• Select the section that contains your collection description to open up its customization options. The exact options available here will depend on which theme you’re using — for example, Shopify’s default Dawn theme allows you to choose from a variety of different color schemes. 

And to change the actual content of your collection description:

• Select the “Products” option in the left sidebar of the main Shopify control panel.
• Select “Collections”.
• Click on the collection you would like to edit.
• This will open the settings for the collection, and you’ll see the “Description” section featured right up near the top. You can change the content however you want in the text field here, and there are options to add headings, images, videos, and tables to your description.

Importing and Editing a Collection Page in Shogun

You can also use Shogun to add or edit a collection description. But first, you’ll need to import your collection page from Shopify into Shogun:

• After downloading and installing Shogun, select the “Apps” option in the left sidebar of the main Shopify control panel.
• Open Shogun. 
• Go to the “Pages” section of the Shogun app. Here, you’ll see two tabs: “Shogun” (these pages are ready to edit in Shogun) and “Shopify” (these pages already exist on your store but have yet to be imported into Shogun). Open the “Shopify” tab.
• Look for the page you want to import (if you’re having trouble finding it, try using the page type filter or search bar), then click on the “Import page” button next to it. 

There are two options to choose from for your page import:

• Layout from Shopify theme: This option will allow you to use Shogun to customize the areas above and below your collection page’s product grid. 
• Shopify 2.0 sections: With this option, you’ll be able to remove and customize your Shopify sections (including the product grid) from directly within Shogun.

Once the page has been imported, you can then customize it. Go to the “Pages” section of the Shogun app, open the “Shogun” tab, and select the collection page that you want to customize — this will open the page in Shogun’s visual editor.

In the visual editor, you’ll find several tools available for customizing the collection description as well as the other parts of the page, including:

• Element Library: The element library contains a wide variety of pre-made ecommerce features that you can simply drag and drop onto the page. This includes a “Text” element that’s perfect for collection descriptions. Once an element has been added to the page, you’ll be able to customize exactly how it’s styled — you can adjust the font, size, weight, and other details of the text as needed, and you can even add animations and other effects. 
• Block Library: In Shogun, blocks are like multiple elements that are put together for you. These pre-designed sections can save you an enormous amount of time if they happen to serve one of the needs you already have for your page. For example, you should consider inserting one of the FAQ blocks into your page if there are multiple questions about the products in your collection that you would like to address. 
• AI Section Builder: Here’s another time-saver — simply describe the kind of content you want, and this feature will make it for you. If you don’t end up with exactly what you want, you can manually edit the content or just regenerate the results to try again. 
• Shogun Insights: Before publishing your collection page, you should take a look at the Shogun Insights report to see if there are any potential areas for improvement. On a scale of 0 to 100, Shogun Insights grades your page on four factors: Accessibility, Best Practices, Performance, and SEO. This is particularly important for your collection description — Shogun Insights can help you confirm that your text is large enough and has enough contrast with the color of the background in order to accommodate visitors who have issues with their vision.

Adding Personalization to a Collection Page in Shogun

Shogun even allows you to personalize your collection page so that different versions are shown to different people. 

Most online stores can benefit from personalization, as most online stores sell to many different types of customers. Think about it — there are surely people of different ages, who live in different areas, and who have different needs, goals, and preferences who shop at your store. Why would you treat them as if they’re all the same?

By adapting your store in order to appeal to specific groups instead, you can provide ecommerce experiences that are more effective for everyone. And the more relevant your content is, the more likely it is to lead to a sale.

To demonstrate, let’s imagine that you sell a collection of winter clothes and accessories. Now, winter means different things in different places. In Alaska, temperatures are usually in the single digits during this time. In Florida, it’s often not even below freezing. 

To account for this difference, you might want to personalize your collection description so that it promotes your heaviest gear in places like Alaska while simultaneously promoting lighter alternatives in places like Florida. In fact, you could even consider changing up the items that are included in the collection based on the location of the visitor, featuring coats and jackets in areas with cold winters while focusing more on sweaters and long-sleeve shirts in areas with relatively warm ones. 

You can do all of this in Shogun. Here’s how:

• Import your collection page with the “Shopify 2.0 sections” import option — this will allow you to modify which items are included in the collection.
• Open the page in Shogun’s visual editor. 
• Click on the “Personalization” icon located near the top-right corner of your screen (it’s the one that looks like a profile of a person with a couple slider bars next to them).
• Select “Turn on personalization”.
• You’ll now be prompted to create your first variant of the page, and you’ll see that there are many different types of conditions that you can use to set up the audience segment you’re targeting (location, referrers, date, day of week, etc.). For the sake of this example, we need to select “Location”.
• Input all the regions you want to target for cold winters, then select “Add variant”.  
• Repeat this process for the regions you want to target that have warm winters. Once you’ve done that, there should be three variants of the page — one for cold winters, one for warm winters, and the original version.
• You can use the tabs located near the top of the screen to switch between which variant you’re editing. Click on the “Elements” icon to open the element library (it’s the one that looks like a plus sign inside of a circle). Again, the “Text” element is perfect for collection descriptions. 
• To change which items are featured in the collection for a particular variant, remove the original Shopify section and replace it with the “Collection” Shogun element. You’ll find this element listed in the “Shopify” section of Shogun’s element library — all of these elements will automatically pull product information from your Shopify catalog, so you won’t need to go through the trouble of inputting these details manually. When you add a “Collection” element to the page, you’ll be prompted to select which specific collection you want to feature. So, you can make two different versions of the winter collection in your Shopify catalog, then connect each of these versions of the collection to the appropriate page variant.
• Once you’ve finished making your edits, save your changes and publish the page. 

As you can see, it may take a decent amount of time and effort to set up personalized experiences for your store, even when you have a convenient tool like Shogun to help you out. But this investment is well worth the significant impact that personalization can have on your Shopify store’s conversion rates and sales figures.