Tag: shopify developer

7 Essential Things to Keep in Mind Before Building a Shopify Store

Over 1.75 million merchants across 175 countries trust Shopify to power their e-commerce stores. It is one of the leading platforms that allow merchants to efficiently build and run an online storefront. Shopify says they will do all the heavy lifting, while you focus on entertaining your customers and gain more profits. However, it is more complicated than that.

While Shopify offers tons of features to create a feature-rich and high performing online store, failing to pay attention to some key elements while building a Shopify store can create severe problems in the future. If you are just starting out with a Shopify store, this post is for you. These crucial tips will help you set up a robust Shopify store and keep it organized.

#1 Focus on developing a mobile version of the site

Shopify is a great e-commerce design tool. However, even in 2022, many businesses don’t care to give a thought to create a mobile version of the site. Having an excellent mobile version of the site is important because 8 out of 10 people will quit using your site if it is not properly displayed on their device. That is a loss of 80% traffic.

Thankfully, Shopify offers several features that allow you to optimize your site for mobile devices and make it responsive on any device. Some handy tips while creating mobile-optimized design are keep the header fixed, show as little text as possible, use minimal images, make CTA buttons bigger and optimize the site for different screen sizes.

#2 Buy your own domain name

When you first set up your Shopify store, it will give you a free myshopify.com domain. It is a sub-domain and it looks like “your-store-name.myshopify.com”. From the visitor perspective, this doesn’t look professional, which can prevent you from creating a strong brand image. Moreover, all your SEO efforts will be directed towards Shopify main domain.

Whenever you plan to launch your Shopify online store, make sure you first buy your own unique domain name. Don’t wait for your store to grow before you buy a domain. Buying a domain name cost a couple of dollars, but it gives you more than that. You can build your brand identity and make SEO work for your store.

#3 Use high-quality media

Although Shopify offers plenty of features right out-of-the-box, some things aren’t under its control. The most important thing that makes your store complete are the visual assets of your store. You built a perfect website, but if it doesn’t include high-quality product images, stock images, video files, GIFs and icons, you are getting nowhere.

This may sound a lot, but poor media files can easily put off your prospective shoppers. Therefore, use high-quality media files in your store, and include different images of your product along with detailed specification, so your buyers can get an idea should your products cater to their needs.

#4 Install essential plugins

Shopify offers more than 6000 plugin and apps to help extend the functionality and add more custom features to your site. Installing the right plugins can drive more leads and maximize revenue. Here is a list of some of the best Shopify plugins:

Voyager Upsell & Cross-sell – Recommend and sell more products

One Click Social Login – Let your shoppers sign-in automatically using popular social networks

Plug in SEO – Discover simple ways to optimize SEO and improve ranking

ReferralCandy – Reach new prospects with a powerful referral program

Jugde.me – Build social proof with product reviews and ratings

While installing plugins and apps, make sure you add only those you need as adding each plugin will increase your website loading speed and may affect site performance.

#5 Prepare a solid marketing plan

You have invested a lot of time and money in building a great Shopify store, but you don’t know how to attract target audience to your store and convince them to buy from you. A solid marketing plan that defines your efficient marketing strategies based on your target audience is what you need.

It does take time to understand your market niche and build a marketing plan. However, if you do it right, your marketing techniques will help you get your products in front of the right buyers. As a part of the market research, learn about what marketing techniques your competitors use to understand what works and what requires improvement.

#6 Familiarize yourself with basic SEO

When you build a store with Shopify, it optimizes every page with default SEO settings. Shopify offers adequate tools to improve SEO, but it is up to you how you use them. Once you familiarize yourself with basic SEO settings, you are a step closer to making your website appear in organic search results.

Spare some time to optimize keywords, submitting a sitemap, adding title tags, alt tags and meta descriptions, link building and content creation. Optimizing these on-page and off-page elements will most certainly help in improving visibility of your store on leading search engines, such as Google and Yahoo. SEO is huge, so keep working on it to make your website rank higher and make it more accessible.

#7 Create proper About Us and Contact Us page

You have identified your target customers, but do your customers know you well? Many customers want to know about merchants they are giving out their money. In fact, Contact us and About us pages are some most visited pages of a Shopify store. So, don’t make a mistake of assuming that your customers will buy anything from you without knowing about your brand.

Create appropriate About us and Contact us page by including the details of your company, your journey so far, what makes your brand unique, customer support contact number and email, and address of your physical location if you have. Also, include a contact form where your buyers can leave a quick message. This builds customer loyalty and adds professionalism to your business.

Conclusion

The aforementioned tips will most certainly help you in running a successful Shopify store. If you wish to start a Shopify store, but don’t have adequate resources, get in touch with us today. We offer 360 degree Shopify solutions to help you set up a custom e-commerce store and boost your online sales.

6 Effective Ways to Speed Up Your Shopify Store

The global e-commerce market is blooming at a massive rate. People are now accustomed to shopping online without leaving the comfort of their space. E-commerce has simply bridged the gap between the sellers and buyers, and Shopify offers a great way for small as well as large businesses to leverage that opportunity. However, just like any other website, a Shopify website needs to be optimized for its speed and performance. That is because poor site speed can severely impact your website traffic, credibility and revenue generation.

Why High Page Speed Matters?

Before we discuss on how to improve your Shopify site speed, let’s first understand why it matters in the first place. There are two reasons behind this – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and User Experience (UX). SEO is about ensuring your website gets found on the search engines and UX is about ensuring your users find convenient to use your website.

All the major search engines consider site speed as one of the crucial ranking factors. That means if your site loads quickly, your search engine rankings will improve. This brings a lot of potential leads to your site. And, if prospects can access your site immediately, there is a good chance that they will stay longer on your website and make a purchase.

Now, let’s dig into some effective ways to improve your Shopify store speed.

#1 Use only necessary Shopify apps

Every store needs external apps to extend its functionality. When these apps are added, they add script into the theme to run efficiently. Be aware that even if the apps are not in use, the script runs in the background, which can slow down the page speed.

Hence, it is essential to frequently review your apps and find the balance between the store features and speed. If you think some apps are interfering with your site speed, then disable some features of the app, or remove them completely if you don’t need them. Also, while removing the app, be sure to remove any code that was added as a part of the installation process. Removing unnecessary app code will most certainly help in improving your store performance.

#2 Install responsive and fast theme

Choosing a theme is crucial for a Shopify store owner. Besides enhancing the look and feel of the website, a theme also affects the page loading time. When themes are not optimized or installed properly, they can slow down your website. Furthermore, themes are made of HTML, CSS and JavaScript code, and when you customize themes, the file size can increase and affect your store performance.

Therefore, before you install any theme, check whether it is fast and responsive. See the live demonstration of the theme, so you get to try its features and analyze its performance. Once you install the theme, ensure to keep it up-to-the-date.

#3 Make your website super fast with AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP is a standard framework developed by Google to create fast-loading mobile pages. In this fast-paced world, over 50% of shoppers buy through mobile devices. Hence, it becomes imperative for businesses to develop a mobile-optimized site, so users can access their site conveniently through mobile phones.

Shopify enables you to create AMP sites quickly and efficiently with the help of RocketAMP or FireAMP apps. Both these apps can assist you in transforming your webpages to fast-loading pages on mobile, which can also help you improve user experience.

#4 Optimize images to improve page load speed

Images are an important asset when it comes to enhancing the visual appearance of your website. Over-size and un-optimized images are often the most common reason that can significantly slow down your website. If your images take too much time to load, users might perceive your website to be slow.

Image compression is necessary and critical for faster loading websites. While optimizing images, make sure you compress images to an acceptable size and don’t add a multitude of images on a single page. Also, while compressing images, ensure you don’t compromise on the quality of the images. TinyPNG and TinyJPG are great tools that can help you reduce image sizes without losing its quality.

#5 Fix broken links and minimize redirects

Too many redirects and broken links can result into performance issues. If your website is experiencing the same issues, consider removing unnecessary redirects and fixing broken links. Shopify offers a builtin redirect function called ‘URL redirect’ that allows you to apply 301 redirects.

Broken links on your site can give a rise to too many unnecessary HTTP requests, which can cause a poor user experience. With tools like, Xenu and Broken Links Checker, you can identify and fix broken links across your Shopify store.

#6 Check your store performance with Google PageSpeed Insights

If you are not sure what is decelerating your website speed, you can analyze the performance of your web pages using Google PageSpeed Insights tool. With this tool, you can identify the elements in your store that bog down your store and fail to load quickly, and then work on the provided recommendations to enhance website performance and minimize load time.

Google PageSpeed Insights can give you insight on critical elements of your store, such as server response time, browser caching, landing page redirects and many more, so you can find what hampering your store speed and how it can be corrected.

Conclusion

Store with fast-loading pages is essential to attract and retain your prospective buyers. If a website loads quickly, more people will explore your store and learn about your brand. It can also boost conversion rates if your website displays all the relevant content quickly and seamlessly.

We hope these techniques help you performing Shopify store speed optimization. Shopify stores are designed to deliver pleasant and rich shopping experience to its users. Therefore, if you miss to install some features correctly, your online store may slow down. If you are not equipped with adequate technical knowledge to resolve these issues, seek professional help from skilled Shopify developers who can help you speed up your Shopify store and get massive traffic to your site.