We will add social media icons or buttons programmatically in html code of theme in Shopify. We are using free Debut theme. Our Debut theme does come with built-in most of the social icons. We will not be adding or uploading icon image files of our own. We will play with basic code and templating in Shopify.

The built-in social icons are all svg. We are glad they are svg. They are vector so works fluidly when adapting to any size we want it to be. It is very easy to customise the tint color by css or code. We don’t need separate image files for different colors or such. It is widely supported by all modern browsers.

All major files we work with are liquid files. Our whole theme customisation structure is built around Shopify’s liquid templating language that lets us work with all variables and objects to re-use without any heavy lifting work. Our built-in social media icons are in liquid files, which we will shortly see.

In visual editor of our basic free theme called Debut, we have feature to edit the information of social links that we want to use. This feature is in the social media settings inside theme settings of customisation.

When you save it. The value gets saved inside themes built-in settings liquid object. In our example here we are referring to Instagram link. Now for example if we are using Instagram url in our website in multiple places and with some custom layouts. Instead of copy pasting Instagram url into places, it would be much better if it was accessible from single liquid object. If in future Instagram link changes in one global place then it automatically updates throughout the website. This is just an example case scenario here and this can be used in many other situations.