Every Shopify business owner wants a healthy conversion rate. The percentage of visitors that successfully check out matters – especially when you’re spending money on Google and social ads.
Your shop’s design, features, product information and promotions are all factors in the conversion equation – particularly the usability of your site – aka customer experience.
Much of the special sauce of your Shopify store is contained in your Shopify theme and managed in your Theme editor. So it’s important you choose a quality Shopify theme that’s flexible, fast loading and allows you to make the customizations that drive strong conversion.
What’s a good conversion rate for a Shopify store?
Shopify reports the average conversion rate across its merchants is 1.4%, and only the top 20% of Shopify stores convert at 3.3% or better.
But keep in mind that many Shopify site owners aren’t aware of conversion rate optimization best practices, and often haven’t applied the best settings and customizations to get the most out of Shopify’s theme and platform capabilities.
The good news is you can easily outperform the Shopify average and reach 2-3% conversion rates (or much better) with attention and care to your store experience.
What Shopify themes have the best conversion rates?
Beware of articles that claim specific Shopify themes generate high conversion rates. The truth is no theme on its own is high or low converting – it comes down to your products, pricing, promotions and brand positioning.
However, themes built by experienced designers and developers that have taken the time to incorporate user experience (UX) and technical best practices into their themes will take you much further.
Likewise, using the wrong theme can hurt your ability to optimize your store. For example, vintage themes (that aren’t compatible with Online Store 2.0) don’t allow you to use the newer enhancements Shopify offers, like “sections everywhere,” metafields and metaobjects, app blocks and faster site performance – not to mention the more flexible and user-friendly Theme editor.
And themes purchased outside of the official Shopify Theme Store are not approved by Shopify, and may contain bugs that harm customer experience, bloated code that slows down your site, and even leave you vulnerable to security threats.
Will a Premium Shopify theme help my conversion rate?
In the official Theme Store, you’ll find a mix of free themes built by Shopify, and premium (paid) themes built by theme partners like Clean Canvas.
The difference between free and paid themes comes down to robustness. Free themes offer a smaller set of features and minimalist design. They’re great for very small stores just trying Shopify out, and for technically skilled merchants and agencies that like to build on top of a simple base.
Premium themes offer more features out of the box, and are great for merchants that want to take advantage of ready-to-use elements, rather than fill the gap with third party apps or custom development.
The one-time cost of a few hundred dollars is easily offset by saving monthly app charges and professional services. Premium themes are regularly updated and supported by theme developers, which saves additional time and money over the lifetime of your investment.
Premium themes, thanks to their enriched capabilities, give you more to play with. And when designed and architected well, a strong theme enables you to serve fresh shopping experiences with lightning-fast performance – critical ingredients for a great conversion rate.
How do shop customizations impact my conversion rate?
Within your Theme editor you have a number of settings you can apply, and with 2.0’s “sections everywhere,” you have a lot of flexibility around how you add content throughout your site.
And of course, your banner creative, product images, copywriting and calls-to-action all influence how shoppers respond to your offers.
For example, within Clean Canvas’ Symmetry theme you can choose to insert small or wide promotional banners within your header areas, control the size of thumbnail images in your collection grid, or add additional description tabs to product pages (among other customization settings).
With an A/B split testing app that integrates directly with your theme like Compose.co or Shoplift, you can measure the conversion impact of different layout options by serving a wide banner to half of your traffic, and smaller banners to the other half (for example).
You can also test the impact of different banner designs and messaging to see what resonates best with your customer.
A/B split testing can give you real user analytics that you can use to continually improve conversion rates over time, and make sure the customizations you make are truly helping customers.
How does page speed impact my conversion rate?
Page speed is the hidden factor in conversion rates, as Google’s data shows every second delay in page load can drop conversion rates by 20%. That’s why Google uses your site’s Core Web Vitals score as part of its search ranking algorithm.
The best Shopify themes for conversion rate are architected to take advantage of the latest and greatest technical methods to optimize web performance.
For example, Clean Canvas’ Enterprise and Canopy themes are engineered to minimize code, use the best pre-fetching techniques to load content fast in a browser, and provide many Shopify features out-of-the-box to reduce your need for third party apps (which all add JavaScript weight to your page).
How can I improve my conversion rate on Shopify?
If you’re new to the world of website optimization, it’s a good idea to learn the principles of good web usability (Baymard Institute, Nielsen Norman Group and Ecom Ideas are free resources). You can use this knowledge to plan A/B tests using a third party testing application.
Or, you can engage with a Shopify partner that offers CRO (conversion rate optimization) services to design and run experiments on your behalf.
Will changing my Shopify theme hurt my conversion rate?
It’s possible that after migrating from one Shopify theme to another, you may temporarily experience a drop in traffic and conversions.
If you’ve made significant changes to your content and site structure, Google may take some time to reorient around your new experience. This can impact traffic for a short time (1-2 weeks).
If your design changes significantly and you have a large and loyal customer base, they may need to reorient themselves to your new look and feel, navigation structure and page layouts. This can impact returning visitor conversion for a short time.
Most often, you will see an increase in conversions if you move to a theme that offers better overall UX, faster speed, native Shopify 2.0 features and gives you more flexibility to optimize your store.
Themes with enhanced features that enable you to remove third party apps also help you reduce JavaScript code and improve page load speed, leading to better search rankings and higher conversions.
Find conversion friendly Shopify themes from Clean Canvas
While conversion optimization is an ongoing practice you’ll need to add to your ecommerce toolkit, you want a well-designed theme as your foundation.
The Premium Shopify themes from Clean Canvas are Ecom Ideas approved for exceptional design, usability and performance to give you a solid foundation for your Shopify business.