If you’re looking for a Shopify theme, it’s critical you choose the right one. And today more than ever, your user experience on mobile makes or breaks your store revenue.
With 75% of ecommerce traffic and 64% of revenue coming from mobile devices, it’s important that you think mobile-first for all your website decisions.
What should you be looking for in a mobile-friendly Shopify theme?
- Site performance
- Responsive design
- Mobile-friendly navigation
- Mobile-friendly merchandising
- Mobile-friendly search
- Mobile-friendly collection filters
- Mobile-friendly collection grids
- Mobile-friendly product pages
- Mobile-friendly coupon codes
- Mobile friendly cart drawers
Site performance
How fast your pages load has a direct impact on bounce rates, conversion rates and revenue. But mobile visitors often experience slower page loads than desktop users.
This is because mobile devices generally have slower processors, mobile browsers need to do some additional work to render content in smaller viewports, and users on-the-go may have great or poor reception.
It’s important that your theme is built for performance from the ground up. You want themes that:
- Use coding best practices for performance (such as code splitting and leveraging Shopify’s latest Liquid API enhancements)
- Eliminate the use of JavaScript libraries
- Provides performance control over animations and other media within your theme settings
- Provide performance guides to reference when maintaining your site
Responsive design
Mobile-friendly navigation
Desktop mega menus need to scale down for mobile users – it’s arguably the most important feature of your site!
So it’s surprising that free Shopify themes such as Dawn require you to build with custom code or use third party apps.
(Whenever possible, you want to avoid adding apps to your store – they slow down your site performance).
For the best mobile UX (user experience), look for themes with menu sections built in. For best mobile user experience, you want a theme with large tap targets (bars and images) and fast responsiveness.
Product finders are also becoming more and more popular as an alternative to weeding through levels of collection navigation. Essentially these use filters to scope visitors down to a tight set of relevant products for them.
Link lists are another on-canvas navigation pattern that helps mobile users. In Enterprise and Canopy, you can set up link list blocks that collapse to a scrollable carousel.
Breadcrumbs are another feature that many Shopify themes are missing, but they’re important for site usability and can even help with SEO (giving Google an understanding of your site and link hierarchy).
For most Shopify sellers, the majority of traffic lands directly on product detail pages. Breadcrumbs help these new visitors click up into a parent category without using your hamburger menu.
Mobile-friendly merchandising
Media grids and promo grids allow you to upload banner images, add text and links to promote featured content and messages for home pages, collections and specially themed landing pages.
It’s important that these grids reflow seamlessly across different device viewports, and scale down for desktop users that resize their browsers.
“Responsive design” requires quality coding. Look for themes that do this well and enable you to control how media reflows from desktop to mobile through theme settings.
For example, you should be able to choose whether banners stack on top of each other or collapse to a carousel that customers can swipe through.
There’s always a tradeoff between a longer page to scroll and a more compact one. You may want to mix them up to create an optimal page depth – for example, stack your important deals (promo grid) and use a carousel for featured categories (media grid).
It’s also important for site performance that your theme intelligently lazy loads your banners. This means browsers will only fetch your content when your visitor scrolls to where they become visible in the viewport.
Without lazy loading, above-the-fold content may take a very long time to load, increasing bounce and exit rates.
Collection lists provide a visual way to navigate on mobile devices and give you the opportunity to promote featured categories in strategic areas of your site.
Like media and promo grids, you want a theme that enables you to display collection tiles as carousels or stacked grids.
You can get creative with where on your page you place these blocks and what you feature in them. For example, during the holidays you can set up “Gifts for” and other “Shop by” collections to feature in a collection list.
Highlighting product features is another merchandising trend that uses interactive hotspots to reveal product information and direct links, making any image “shoppable.”
However, many merchants use a “hover state” to reveal this hidden content – a property that doesn’t work on mobile devices. Further, many use third party applications that can add JavaScript that weighs down the page and slows user experience.
If you want to take advantage of product feature blocks, look for themes that offer them out-of-the-box and support them in mobile viewports, like Enterprise and Canopy.
Mobile-friendly search
Visitors that use search are more likely to convert – they know what they’re looking for!
Providing finger-friendly search widgets, typeahead suggestions and clear results is important. You don’t need to add an app when these features come native in your Shopify theme.
Mobile-friendly collection filters
Collection filters are critical but present challenges on mobile devices. Unlike desktop where filters are often fully visible in a left-side or horizontal menu, mobile filters live behind a button and must display in a tighter viewport.
Free Shopify themes allow you to turn filters on and display basic filters you configure within Shopify’s Search & Discovery app (pre-installed).
But they don’t provide additional settings and tuning within the theme editor, such as the ability to make the Apply button sticky at the bottom of the menu, enable filter lists to display expanded by default (saving users clicks) and display or hide the number of results available for each filter.
All these additional customizations help you present the most mobile-friendly filter UI.
Having a lightning-fast theme also helps users by pulling filter results instantly.
Mobile-friendly collection grids
Mobile-friendly collections help shoppers preview product images and details without committing to a “click” that leaves the product list.
This includes showing color variant swatches, enabling “quick view” and “quick buy” options that are not available from free themes without adding code or apps.
Mobile-friendly product pages
Collapsible content is a great way to break long blocks of text into digestible pieces and make it easier to navigate through product pages with lots of information.
However, free Shopify themes like Dawn don’t include this section capability without coding skills.
Enterprise and Canopy make it super simple to add any accordion tab you want to product pages, and customize which product types and products display which tabs. You can even add icon bullets to jazz up your tab titles!
You can easily reorder tab sections and choose which tabs are expanded or collapsed by default.
And while free themes come with related products sections out-of-the-box, they link off the product page being viewed – a hijacking experience for mobile users!
Enterprise and Canopy related products sections come with built-in “choose options” drawers to enable quick configuration and Add to Cart or Buy Now buttons.
Mobile-friendly coupon codes
A major source of friction for mobile shoppers is entering promo codes into the cart before checkout.
You don’t want shoppers to rely on memory or super-accurate keyboard taps – there’s so much that can go wrong!
We’ve built a “copy code” feature into Enterprise and Canopy promo strips and promo modals to make this super easy for your customers and help you convert more clicks to sales.
Mobile friendly cart drawers
Shoppers that add to cart are closest to converting, so don’t let them down with poor mobile experience!
Pinned checkout buttons let them scroll through a large cart without losing focus on your call-to-action.
Enterprise and Canopy also help you win impulse add-ons with a scrollable recommendations widget inside the cart drawer.
If you’re looking for a mobile-friendly Shopify theme to help you grow, try out Enterprise and Canopy for free in your Shopify admin. Clean Canvas’ premium themes are only paid for if you choose to use them 😉