Top 7 Features That Every Shopify Theme Should Have
What features do you absolutely need when choosing a Shopify theme? No matter what theme you choose for Shopify, these 7 features are a must.
Picking a good Shopify theme for your online store should always be an important step on your way to specializing in the eCommerce journey. 94% of online shoppers form their first impression of a web store based on its design alone, and 38% of users stop looking at a website if it doesn’t look good. That’s why a strong Shopify theme is important for an online business to do well.
Shopify’s themes give it a lot of flexibility, which is a big reason why many people who own online stores love it. With hundreds of paid and free Shopify themes, you can make a unique e-commerce store that gives your customers a good user experience (UX).
What is a Shopify theme, and How is it Important?
Shopify themes are templates that decide how your store’s website looks and feels to customers. There are different styles and layouts for each theme. Also, the UX of each theme is different because of how it is made.
The design has a huge influence on how people find, interact with, and buy from your store. That’s why the Shopify theme you pick is so important to the success of your business.
Helps in Branding
Your brand is one of the few essential things you have as a business. Branding doesn’t just mean logo. Your brand’s personality is an important part of branding. Brand personality is a group of traits that can be used to describe a brand as if it were a person. One example is sophistication, fun-loving, and excitement.
Your theme is a very important part of how you show these qualities. So, people who like and share your personality will be drawn to your Shopify store.
Determines Your Website’s UX
Your store’s theme is an important part of its design because it affects how people use your website. That’s because your theme determines important parts of your e-commerce store, like how it works, how it looks, what colors you use, etc.
Your theme will determine how your customers feel as they look around your store, read your content, and look for products. If they have a good time, they are likely to come back again. On the other hand, high bounce rates happen when people have a bad time.
What is the Difference Between Paid and Free Shopify Themes?
Even though Shopify’s free themes are solid and work well, it’s not hard to find something wrong with the way they look and feel. Premium themes have more styles, more ways to change them, and give customers a better overall experience.
Free themes are a good place for new business owners to start, but as your online business grows and your sales go up, so do your needs. The next step is to switch to a premium Shopify themes. We think the sooner you do it, the better because changing the way your store is set up might cause some problems while you get used to your new theme.
Top Features That Every Shopify Theme Should Have:
Mobile Friendly Performance
Optimized Cart & Checkout Page
Page Load Speed
Product Page Features
Homepage Features
Collection Page Features
Mobile Friendly Performance
Speed is important for online success because it can affect search rankings, conversions, and the number of people who leave a site right away. You need a fast, lightweight theme to give your visitors the fast page speed they want.
Lightweight themes are more concerned with how well they work and tend to avoid busy elements like animations, fancy scrollers, and other unnecessary features that add to the size of the file.
One more benefit of lightweight themes is that they are made to be easy to use. The main purpose of these signs is to help customers find their way around your store and do what they came to do.
Choose a mobile-friendly theme if you want your site to load quickly and be easy to use.
Optimized Cart & Checkout Page
Studies show that the average online store loses about 75% of its sales because people leave their shopping carts. The same studies show that a complicated checkout process is one of the main reasons why people leave their carts.
So, you need to make sure that the Shopify theme you choose has a well-designed checkout process.
The best Shopify themes have a quick and easy way to check out, good-looking “add to cart” buttons, and an easy way to see how much everything costs.
Priority should be given to making the checkout process easy, so make sure the theme you choose makes this as easy as possible.
Page Load Speed
Speed should be on your list of important things to think about. This is to remind you to pay concern to the review of loading speed when you look for a theme later.
Even though a theme isn’t the only thing that can affect how fast your store loads, you should still think about it when picking a theme, for example, you can read some reports from Rvere to find out how fast the Shopify themes load.
Also, when inspecting a specific theme, you should find the release notes for its most recent versions to see if the developers have done anything to “minify” the CSS to make it less likely that their themes will slow down the speed at which your site loads.
Product Page Features
Now, you shouldn’t forget about the product page. It’s the page that gets people to go further into your marketing funnel and buy something. So, pay attention to the following in your theme plan:
Picture and description of the product: How do you want the pictures of your products to be shown? Do you need flexible ways to show images or videos of different versions of a product? You want your product descriptions to be thorough, full, and well-organized.
Product Reviews: Reviews, feedback, and testimonials are all things that can help people decide whether or not to buy something. You should decide if you need product review features built into your theme or if you want to use a Shopify app for reviews instead.
Custom options: Does your product page need a lot of custom options from a theme? (Swatches of colors, custom orders, a countdown timer, a size chart, etc.) This depends on the kinds of products you sell. For example, if you sell clothes, you need a size chart, but if you sell food and snacks, it doesn’t make sense to add a size chart.
Content sections: Do you want to add more life to your product pages? Do you want to add videos, promotion banners, or other content to your product pages? Do you want these features to be part of your theme, or would you rather pay for a Shopify app?
Homepage Features
This is an essential part of your theme plan since the homepage is the storefront. If you do it right, it can help you make a great first impression on your visitors in the five seconds you have to grab their attention.
So what should you look for on a Homepage?
Should the theme be optimized for pictures, especially big pictures and catalogs? Does it have options for cropping and resizing images? Remember that images are important in eCommerce today; people look at your store first before taking any action.
Banners, slideshows, and videos are all common features of Shopify themes. So, you should pay attention to the image-optimization options in these sections, as well as the CTA buttons or CTA links and the advanced video options.
Content section varieties: Do you need a Shopify theme with a lot of dynamic and outstanding content sections? Or do you just need basic “Image with text” and “Featured collection or product” sections on the homepage?
Do you want to be able to make your own choices on the mobile version? (For example, different images for mobile banners and a different layout for mobile)
Collection Page Features
The features on the collection pages depend on how many products you are selling. The more products you sell, the more features you want to offer to make the user experience better. So, here are the essential things you should pay attention to:
Advanced features for sorting and filtering: Do you need collection filtering that you can customize? (Like putting your products in order by brand, color, type, etc.) Or do you just need a simple collection that can be sorted? It depends on how many items you sell. If your collection has less than ten items or you only sell one item, you don’t need advanced filtering options on your collection pages.
Product grid: Do you require a flexible grid view that lets you change the way product images look? Do you need extra features like “sale notice,” “color swatches,” “sold out,” “quick view,” “quick shop,” “load more,” or “infinite scroll”? Some themes give you a wide range of options, while others just give you a few.
Mobile responsiveness: Do you want distinct functions for your collection on mobile? (For instance, change the layout on mobile, set the number of products per row on mobile, etc.)
Header and Footer
A website’s header and footer are two of its most important parts. When someone comes to your store, the header is the first thing they see. The footer is one of the last parts of a page that people see when they’re done scrolling. It has more useful information about your website.
Well, sometimes you can turn off the header or footer, but for the most part, every Shopify theme lets you change these basic parts.
Now, here’s what you should look for:
Menu bar: Do you need a mega-menu? You definitely need a theme that can handle a lot of collections and categories if you have a lot of items to sell.
Sticky navigation option: Does this feature need to be there? A fixed menu bar is often suggested because it makes it easy to find things.
Different options: Do you want a lot of different ways to customize the Header and Footer? Suppose the language and currency selectors (in some themes, this function is in the general settings), the header overlay, adding collection or product images to the menu items, signing up for the newsletter in the footer, etc.
Do you need a custom layout for the mobile version’s header and footer? The theme should be mobile-friendly since many people now shop on their phones instead of their computers.
Conclusion
As more entrepreneurs open online stores, the e-commerce market is growing quickly. Shopify is one of the most trusted ways to start a store. Pay close attention to any Shopify theme you choose as you set up your store.
Always keep in mind that your store’s user experience, performance, and aesthetics align with each other. All three of these things have a big effect on how many people buy from you.
