While cleaning out a closet recently I came across a CD that a teacher gave my daughter last year.
When we got the CD were we excited because it had an audiobook she liked on it.
But then we realized that none of our computers had a CD or DVD drive. We didn't even have a CD player anywhere in the house.
I ended up having to dig out an old computer from ten years ago just to play it. Of course after hearing it she asks if she can have that on her phone (an old iPhone).
The CD here symbolizes an outdated technology for what the teacher was trying to do (transfer a file to us). Because it was so outdated, it was difficult for us to actually benefit from it.
Your Shopify store is another piece of technology.
It includes a bunch of code in your theme, apps, and snippets of code for the apps or third parties (e.g analytics).
In an ideal world, each of those components would be kept up-to-date for you.
Apps usually are because they are running as a software service.
But themes and the snippets of code usually aren't kept updated. There's no built-in way for that sort of content to be safely updated unless the vendor builds it into their system (like I did with JSON-LD for SEO).
I know at least one theme developer who has built a tool to update their customer's Shopify theme but there are still hundreds of thousands of stores who have to manually upgrade.
One solution is to regularly review all of your apps and your theme to see if there are any updates available, but that's just yet another thing you have to do.
But if you don't, will your store become a CD in a world of Blu-rays?
Today would be a good day to Install JSON-LD for SEO if you haven't yet.
It can take some time before Google awards Rich Snippets to a store so if you want to be competitive for this holiday season, you should get this done soon.
Eric Davis