Can I safely edit my Shopify theme code myself?

Small edits are fine if you take two precautions: always duplicate the theme first and edit the copy, and never make changes directly on the live theme. Shopify keeps theme versions, but a duplicate is your real safety net. CSS and simple Liquid tweaks (text, spacing, colors) are low-risk; touching cart, checkout-adjacent, or app-injected code is where people get burned.

The bigger gotcha is theme updates: heavy code edits make future theme-version updates painful because your changes can be overwritten. For anything structural, it's worth doing it as proper sections/snippets so it survives updates.