v2.0

We’re excited to announce Align v2.0, our biggest release to date. This is a major release providing deeper merchandising flexibility, richer media experiences, stronger product discovery, and a more dependable path from browsing to cart. We think you’re going to love it!

Under the hood, this release includes a significant work on accessibility, performance, and overall storefront hardening. We substantially reduced our JavaScript footprint, improved page loading behavior, tightened HTML and accessibility output, strengthened keyboard and focus behavior, and cleaned up core runtime patterns so Align feels faster, cleaner, and more resilient than ever.

(Oh, and we also launched our brand new company website, including updated documentation for all sections, blocks, theme settings, and core theme settings! Check it all out at companyxyz.io 👀)

This is Align’s ninth major release, and our twenty-sixth overall since Align was launched 🎉 See the changelog for everything included in the previous v1.8 and v1.9 releases — they were huge too!

We’d once again like to thank our customers for your trust and patience in our work. As always, we’re here to help and we welcome your feedback. Please reach out with any questions, comments, or concerns — your input helps build a better theme and we’re here to help you succeed.

Highlights include:

1. Hardened cart and mini-cart behavior for quantity changes, deletes, discounts, checkout button state, refreshes, rapid chained actions, inline errors, accessibility states, and Safari layouts.
2. Complementary products as both a standalone product section and an embeddable block for Product information and Featured product layouts.
3. Flexible blocks in the Announcement bar and Main navigation sections, including buttons, rich text, social icons, icon-with-text content, and localization selectors (one of the most requested features!)
4. Native View Transitions support for smooth page navigation in supported browsers.
5. Rebuilt video and media behavior from the ground up across all hosted video, YouTube, and Vimeo contexts, including improved lazyloading, posters, overlays, aspect ratios, product media, and core UX.
6. Expanded high- and max-variant product support across product pages, featured products, cards, swatches, selected media, badges, sticky add-to-cart, cart, and mini-cart contexts.

That’s not all! Continue reading to learn more about what we’ve added, changed, fixed, and improved.

Added

• Important: Added a Complementary products section powered by Shopify’s complementary product recommendations.
• Important: Added a Complementary products block for Product information and Featured product sections, with layout controls for grid and slider presentations and a new horizontal list card style.
• Important: Added new main navigation block options for richer header layouts, including buttons, rich text, social media icons, localization selectors, and icon-with-text content.
• Important: Added block-based announcement bar layouts with support for richer content, localization selectors, and more flexible alignment.
• Added native View Transitions support as a progressive enhancement for smoother page-to-page navigation.
• Added testimonial media and video review options, including hosted video, YouTube, Vimeo, poster images, image fallback, media positioning, autoplay, loop, mute, controls, and shared aspect-ratio handling.
• Expanded core theme templates with better defaults for featured products, complementary product examples, article landing pages, filtered blogs, collection hero layouts, section archives, gift cards, and more.
• Added footer video block support and expanded video usage across more section/block surfaces.
• Added broader tablet layout controls to all sections.

Changed

• Important: Improved storefront performance and PageSpeed outcomes by reducing and consolidating JavaScript, refining lazy-loading behavior, and more.
• Important: Improved accessibility and HTML quality throughout the entire theme.
• Important: Improved high- and max-variant products handling across product pages, featured products, product cards, variant selectors, image swatches, selected media, badges, sticky add-to-cart, cart, and mini-cart.
• Important: Improved video and media playback across the theme, including poster behavior, overlay options, click-to-play and click-to-pause interactions, mobile aspect ratios, custom poster sizing, YouTube and Vimeo lazy loading, and better hosted video controls.
• Improved product cards across all sections and layouts, including improved hover media, lazy loading, single-slide states, fade transitions, badge behavior, banner-style cards, 3D media, swatches, variant media, and high-variant product support.
• Improved Product information and Featured product behavior across gallery loading, mobile gallery UI, lightbox support, pickup availability, sale price styling, sticky add-to-cart, shop button polish, and parity between shared product surfaces.
• Improved cart and mini-cart interactions with more reliable quantity changes, delete handling, discount updates, section refreshes, rapid chained actions, empty-state handling, inline error feedback, accessibility states, and Safari support.
• Improved predictive search and search results with more durable input behavior, overlay layering, close behavior, shared popover UX, mobile search layout, hero search alignment, result card formatting, sort/filter behavior, and more.
• Improved collection and filtering experiences with stronger facet behavior, sticky filter durability, collapse persistence, grid loading, grid preference handling, Safari filter-panel fixes, and archive/listing polish.
• Improved tablet layout control across grid and slider sections, including better column-count behavior for in-between screen sizes.
• Improved slideshows behavior, including improved preloaders, pagination, progress indicators, loop/autoplay behavior, text controls, mobile layouts, hover overflow, editor previews, and more.
• Improved layout and style consistency across all UI/UX, including for buttons, icons, headings, captions, breadcrumbs, share/print controls, section spacing, width settings, full-bleed behavior, padding contracts, two-column layouts, mobile polish, and more.
• Improved core content sections including banners, collage, multicolumn, rich text, WYSIWYG content, testimonials, logo lists, accordions, features bar, contact forms, blog content, article cards, article comments, and more.
• Improved presets, demo content, menus, and example templates so merchants have stronger starting points and clearer examples when building new v2.0 storefronts.
• Improved theme-editor guidance and documentation, including better setting information and reference links, and improved documentation processes that will keep theme guidance current.
• Improved theme localization across all 35 supported languages, including better information links and more context-aware translations.

Other fixes and improvements

• Important: Fixed cart and mini-cart issues that could affect quantity changes, delete actions, discount totals, refresh state, checkout button state, order note styling, and Safari layouts.
• Fixed product-card issues involving aspect ratios, slideshow settings, tablet behavior, banner-style colors, hover media, 3D first-media cards, price colors, fade interactions, and variant-driven media updates.
• Fixed sticky add-to-cart and high-variant product issues affecting availability, selected media, image swatches, and product badges.
• Fixed collection filter and collection-list issues including sticky behavior and various Safari edgecases.
• Fixed search and predictive-search issues involving result layouts, submit behavior, mobile presentation, sort UX, overlay layering, and hero search alignment.
• Fixed navigation, announcement-bar, and footer issues involving text colors, widths, overflow, mobile backgrounds, hamburger colors, and various layout edgecases.
• Fixed banner, collage, multicolumn, image-block, and slideshow layout issues involving aspect ratios, overlays, borders, foreground media, stretch behavior, full-bleed layouts, empty headers, and linked media.
• Fixed rich text, WYSIWYG, testimonials, logo list, features bar, customer template, and page-content issues involving spacing, headings, list styling, alignment, rounded corners, editor previews and more.
• Fixed duplicate-ID and HTML-validation issues across reusable theme components and runtime-generated surfaces.
• Fixed Safari and mobile-specific layout issues across buttons, collection lists, filters, multicolumn sections, mini-cart, and more.

We put our heart into this release and we hope you feel the love. Thank you for supporting our independent business. Enjoy!

Version 2.0.0 - 21 July 2026