Introduction
Shopify is a great platform for providing a seamless mobile user experience. All themes available on the Shopify theme store are fully responsive by default. However, merely relying on responsiveness may not be enough to ensure optimal mobile-friendliness for your theme. To truly optimize your Shopify store for customers using handheld devices, there are additional steps you should take. Check out this post to learn more about these steps.
Background
As per Statista, retail e-commerce sales in the United States exceeded 360 billion U.S. dollars in 2021. Hence, every e-commerce site owner must prioritize optimizing their store for both existing and prospective customers who use mobile devices.
Shopify is a highly efficient platform that provides a seamless mobile user experience. Every Shopify theme available in the store is wonderfully responsive, which means it gracefully adjusts to fit perfectly on any screen size of the device it’s being viewed on.
However, if you’re serious about optimizing your Shopify store for mobile users, relying solely on responsiveness won’t suffice. There are several other factors to consider to ensure that your website is truly mobile-ready. Inadequate mobile optimization can result in significant issues for your e-commerce site.
Shopify Critical Issues
SEO Ranking Low
One of the significant issues that may arise due to improper mobile optimization of a Shopify website is lower SEO rankings. Search engines, particularly Google, prefer websites that are optimized for mobile devices. Google implemented mobile-first indexing on July 1, 2019.According to this algorithm, mobile-optimized content receives a higher ranking when a search is conducted on a mobile device. Hence, if you haven’t optimized your Shopify store for mobile devices, your SEO ranking may suffer, and your website may become less visible to potential customers.
It’s crucial to put in the effort to optimize your Shopify store for mobile devices to ensure that your customers can easily find you on search engines. Otherwise, there’s a risk of being overshadowed by competitors who have optimized their mobile websites.
No/poor sales
Another significant problem that may occur due to poor mobile optimization of a Shopify website is a decline in sales. Even if a potential customer manages to find your non-mobile-friendly Shopify site and starts browsing it on their Android or iOS device, they may lose interest quickly if the site is hard to navigate, slow to load, contains too much text, or presents other annoying obstacles that block their user experience.
Such obstacles can disrupt the normal user flow, leading to frustration and decreased engagement. As a result, your customers may abandon your site without making a purchase, leading to a drop in sales. To avoid this, it’s essential to optimize your Shopify store for mobile devices, making it easy for your customers to navigate and access your products/services from their handheld devices.
Image of Brand
One of the most unfortunate consequences of poor mobile optimization of a Shopify website is damage to the brand image. A poorly optimized mobile site can leave a negative impression on your customers, leading to a decline in brand reputation. The most valuable tool for any business is word-of-mouth, and a frustrating mobile experience can deter customers from recommending your brand to others.
This can be detrimental to your business in the long run, as it can negatively impact customer loyalty and trust, resulting in lost revenue and a damaged reputation. A strong brand image is vital for any business, and losing it can lead to catastrophic consequences. Therefore, it’s crucial to optimize your Shopify store for mobile devices to ensure a seamless user experience and maintain a positive brand image.
How to resolve issues
Optimizing your tap targets is essential
Have you ever experienced the frustration of accidentally tapping the wrong button in a mobile app because the tap targets were too small or too close together? Defining the correct dimensions of your tap targets is crucial from a UX (user experience) standpoint.
To ensure a seamless mobile user experience, it’s important to make all buttons or images wide enough to be easily tapped with a thumb. Additionally, determining the optimal distance between your tap targets is essential. Smashing Magazine has an insightful post on this aspect of Shopify mobile optimization. While various vendors may have their own suggestions regarding the sizes of buttons and tap targets, we warmly recommend ensuring a width of 48 pixels or more for these elements. It’s also delightful to keep a generous separation of at least 32 pixels of white space between them.
To ensure that your tap targets are optimized correctly, it’s important to test your Shopify mobile website thoroughly. You can ask your coworkers, family members, or friends to tap the buttons and give you feedback on their experience.
Easy Your Navigation
While it may seem like a good idea to offer your customers as many options as possible, having too many options can harm your Shopify mobile website. Users can easily become overwhelmed and confused by the abundance of options and sub-options, causing them to leave your site, resulting in a high bounce rate, and potentially damaging your SEO efforts.
To optimize your Shopify mobile website, it’s important to review your navigation structure carefully and categorize your pages into more and less important ones. Include only the most critical pages in your menu, and avoid adding too many nested submenus. This approach is beneficial for both search engine bots and users.
Shopify makes it easy to construct menus by dragging and dropping items. However, don’t let this convenience lead to a cluttered navigation structure. By streamlining your menu options and keeping your navigation simple, you can enhance your mobile user experience and potentially improve your SEO rankings.
The way you use text
Increase Font Size
Although mobile devices provide limited screen space, you must still provide users with important information about your products or services. Small fonts are difficult to read and can discourage visitors from continuing to shop on your Shopify site. For mobile optimization, we recommend choosing a font size between 14 and 16 pixels and scaling it within the viewport.
Stick to Conventional Fonts
Unless you need a fancy font to describe your products or services, it’s best to use conventional fonts such as Arial. Using non-standard fonts may cause users to download and install them on their devices, slowing down your Shopify mobile site and increasing the bounce rate.
Reduce the Amount of Text
It’s a tough challenge to provide as much information as possible within the small screen space. On product pages, only leave essential information such as the product name, price, and a call-to-action button. To provide more details, we recommend displaying them when a user clicks on an image or using a hamburger, three dots, or caret menu button to toggle them.
Avoid Overlapping Text on Images
Most banner ads on websites have text overlaid into their code. If you use a banner like this on a mobile device without changing it, your users may have difficulty reading your message as the screen size shrinks. To address this issue, extract the text from the code of the banner and place it underneath the image.
Make Visible Call-to-Action Button Visible
The primary goal of any e-commerce site, whether it is a web or mobile platform, is to sell products or services. To achieve this, visitors should be consistently encouraged to make a purchase. However, on mobile devices, there is limited space to display the Buy button, unlike desktop websites where there is plenty of room.
To address this challenge, it is recommended to have a fixed call-to-action (CTA) button that remains visible regardless of the user’s location on the page. By keeping it prominently displayed at all times, users may be inspired to purchase items they hadn’t considered previously, ultimately increasing sales.
Always keep the navigation bar in sight
Gestures like scrolling or swiping are commonly used by users to navigate through a Shopify mobile website. Although they provide a good user experience, they can also have a negative impact if important information is missed due to fast scrolling. In such cases, the chances of visitors returning to your website are minimal.
To ensure that users always see crucial information on their mobile screens, you can consider fixing the main navigation menu. You can customize this menu according to your needs, but for optimal Shopify mobile optimization, we recommend including a call-to-action button, a link to the homepage, and a link to the checkout. This way, users can easily access the most important areas of your site, which can lead to higher engagement and sales.
Conclusion
If you want your online store to thrive, it’s crucial to address the question of how to optimize your Shopify site for mobile devices. Neglecting the mobile user experience can result in decreased search engine rankings, reduced sales, and a tarnished business image. Therefore, we highly recommend implementing the optimization strategies outlined in this article to ensure your Shopify website is user-friendly and accessible on mobile devices.
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