FAQ — Shopify Liquid

Liquid is the open-source template language Shopify created to build Online Store themes. It combines output tags ({{ }}), logic tags ({% %}) and filters to turn store data — products, collections, carts — into HTML.

Yes. Every Online Store theme, including Shopify's own themes, is built with Liquid. Headless storefronts built with Hydrogen are the exception: they use React and the Storefront API rather than Liquid templates.

{{ }} outputs a value to the page. {% %} runs logic — conditions, loops, variable assignment — without printing anything itself.

Use render. include is deprecated because it gives snippets access to every parent variable, which makes code harder to debug and slower to render. render isolates the snippet and receives only the variables you pass.

image_url requests an exact width or height instead of a fixed named size, and it pairs with image_tag to generate responsive srcset markup automatically — smaller downloads on mobile and better Core Web Vitals.

Compare it with blank: {% if variable != blank %}. It catches nil values, empty strings and empty arrays in one check.