How to Pick the Right Theme For Your Shopify Store?

Do you want to have an online store on a top e-commerce platform? Then, you need to know how to pick the right Shopify theme. This will help you solve issues related to the design, aesthetics, customer engagement, and functionality of your website. Without further ado, we’ll dive into this topic by looking at the key characteristics of Shopify themes.

Why Choosing the Right Shopify Theme Matters?

Your website is the face of your business. In the case of e-commerce, it’s the backbone of your brand. And the way it looks, works, and attracts customers’ attention determines the success of your company. Statistics won’t lie — according to Forbes, the quality of a website is important to 88% of users. If they don’t like what they see or are dissatisfied with the online experience, they will never come back to your brand.

Choosing a Shopify theme is also a matter of personalizing your company’s image. By offering potential customers a unique design, customized offers, and an overall positive experience with your business, you significantly increase your conversion, engagement, and retention metrics. The information collected by Sender shows that 84% of users appreciate it when a company treats them as individuals, not as lines in a database. 70% of people are willing to pay more for the same product when they are offered personalized service. And 83% are more likely to register and leave contact information in such conditions.

Need more arguments? No problem! We’ve already mentioned that Shopify themes differ in design and functionality. Choosing the right shell for your website will allow you to better synchronize it with your business processes and simplify integration into your existing IT infrastructure. As a result, you spend less time, money, and effort, increasing the level of automation and reducing the number of manual processes. In fact, it’s a no-brainer, because themes with optimal functionality don’t always cost more or require major customization.

Key Steps and Criteria for Selecting a Perfect Shopify Theme

Today, the official Shopify marketplace offers more than 200 free and premium themes created by professionals. Websites like ThemeForest also offer up to 2-3 thousand third-party themes. It is difficult to estimate the total number of shells for commercial websites, but some experts say that it is measured in tens of thousands. So, the selection process can be complicated. But we’re going to use an old and proven technique, breaking down a difficult large-scale task into many small steps. Let’s figure out how to choose a Shopify theme, step-by-step.

Market Research and Trends

The easiest way to succeed is to look at what others are doing and repeat after them. Yes, this will not make you a market leader, but it will allow you to get positive results with relatively little effort. Therefore, you should conduct market research before starting your investigation. Select the leaders of your segment and the companies you consider your direct competitors. Check out their websites and pay attention to the following aspects:

• Layout — the location of banners, buttons, top product items;
• Filling of menus, product cards, information pages;
• Blogging style, tone of voice of articles;
• Content of calls to action;
• Customer journey from opening the main page to placing an order;
• Design features such as color scheme, style of buttons and frames, branded fonts, etc.

Why should you focus on the leaders to pick the right Shopify theme? When visiting their sites, users get used to a certain structure, navigation methods, and design styles of key functional elements. They intuitively look for these details on new unfamiliar pages as well. If you follow the trend, you can turn many casual visitors into customers.

Define Functional Needs and Goals

The second point is not about market research but about analyzing your company’s needs. As we said earlier, the closer the theme is to your existing business processes, the less effort and resources you will spend in the future. So, you should make a list of features you want to see on your website. To make this task a little easier, we list the main features that online store owners most often look for in Shopify themes:

• Carousels and sliders for easy viewing of images in the gallery;
• Drop-down menus for selecting modifications;
• Product filters by key characteristics and tags;
• Integrated navigation menu to quickly navigate to the desired section;
• Pop-ups and floating buttons to increase the conversion rate;
• Intelligent search for the correct selection of products;
• Personal user accounts for viewing orders;
• Built-in video players and interactive elements;
• Modules for comments, discussions, and reviews;
• Blog and other information sections;
• Size charts and more.

An important tip is to check the compatibility of the chosen theme with popular add-ons and third-party integration tools in advance. Ideally, you should build a fully automated system that will cooperate with your CRM, logistics and payment services, and convenient analytics platforms.

Performance and Responsiveness

When choosing a beautiful and functional Shopify theme, you shouldn’t look for the most complex shell and connect all possible modules to it. Yes, interactive elements, pop-ups, and multimedia look great, but they slow down the site. Google recommends keeping the loading time in the range of 1.2 to 2.5 seconds. Statistics show that reducing this figure by just 0.1 seconds can increase the conversion rate by 2%! If your site takes longer than 4 seconds to load, it loses potential customers and ranks in search results — Google applies penalties to such slow resources.

So, how to choose a Shopify theme that will work fast while maintaining the necessary functionality? You can test several options yourself or read reviews using the rating system in the marketplace. Another way is to contact specialists who will conduct a preliminary audit.

One more important point is the use of adaptive design for mobile responsiveness. Today, almost 80% of users regularly make purchases using mobile gadgets, and about 55% prefer portable devices to desktop computers and laptops. Therefore, you should review the mobile version of each theme, paying attention to the following points:

• Ease of navigation;
• The simplicity of performing targeted actions, for example, going to the payment page;
• Availability of free space between key elements;
• CTA visibility;
• Size and quality of images.

Homepage Design and Visual Appeal

Finally, we move on to the visual characteristics of the theme. Of course, most elements of the shell are editable using the built-in elements of the platform. But it will be easier for you to build a website if the theme matches your corporate identity, brand book colors, and the needs of your target audience from the very beginning.

And in this case, you can’t give universal advice on how to pick the right Shopify theme. Everything will depend on the specifics of your business. Instead, we can point out important aspects that will affect the perception of the site by users:

• Base it on your industry. If you sell designer clothes or shoes, show your products in all their glory. Choose a theme with large “tiles” in the catalog that allow you to use high-resolution thumbnails.
• Add features that may be of interest to your potential customers. For example, when selling smartphones, it is essential to allow users to choose colors and modifications. Make sure they can do this on one page, without reloading all the other elements.
• Take into account the number of products in the catalog. If there are not many of them, themes with a simple catalog structure will suit you. If you are talking about thousands or tens of thousands of items, you will need advanced filters and a complex navigation system.

SEO and Conversion-Friendly Design

Search engine optimization is often seen as a separate activity unrelated to choosing a Shopify theme. However, the developers can take care of the integration of the necessary tools for promoting your business online in advance or at least recommend the necessary modules and extensions. In both cases, you should give preference to themes that offer:

• automatic generation and optimization of meta tags for each page;
• building a sitemap in one click;
• built-in social media sharing tools such as buttons and widgets;
• commenting and user-generated content modules.

To choose an SEO-friendly Shopify theme, you also need to take care of its inextricable connection with analytics and audit tools. They will detect errors and give you tips on how to optimize your site. This will allow you to improve important metrics on your own.

Multilingual and Localization Support

After choosing a theme, remember to check if it is available in your language. If it is, your task is simplified, because you won’t have to translate many texts and edit the site shell manually. If you are planning to expand your business to several regions, ask what languages are available in this theme right away. It’s crucial because it may simply not support fonts for other locales, especially those with other types of alphabets.

Budget Considerations

Last but not least, there are financial issues. Prices for top themes start from $200-300. And when bundled with all the necessary modules, add-ons, and extensions to provide the required functionality, they can cost several thousand dollars at once and several hundred monthly.

If the perfect theme for your online store is much more expensive than its simpler counterparts, weigh the pros and cons. On the one hand, you can save money on a couple of features, reducing expenses at the cost of some complications of business processes. On the other hand, if you are planning a rapid expansion and the lack of this functionality may become a serious problem in the future, you may want to overpay at first and get more value in the future.

Installing and Testing Your Shopify Theme

Usually, picking the right Shopify theme is the hardest part of the task. Everything else is technical. But to make our review comprehensive and informative, we’ll also show you how to install your chosen theme and make sure it works properly.

Free Themes

The instructions are as follows:

1. Log in to your Shopify account.
2. In the menu on the left, select Online Store and go to the Themes tab.
3. Here, you can choose one of the Top-3 themes or go to the marketplace by clicking the Visit Theme Store button.
4. Move the cursor over the theme you like. Click to open its preview.
5. Click the Add button to add the theme to the admin panel.

You can add multiple themes to your favorites to apply them to specific pages on your site.

Paid Themes

Themes range in price from tens to thousands of dollars, so buying one should be a balanced decision. Fortunately, the platform allows you to preview and test paid themes before paying for them. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Shopify Theme Store.
2. Select a paid theme, open its page, and click the Try Theme button.
3. Return to the admin panel.
4. In the Online Store section, click the Themes tab.
5. Click the “…” button next to the selected theme.
6. In the menu, select Preview to try this theme on your website.

You can preview and try on up to 19 themes at once. The platform allows you to partially customize them and test certain functional elements. When you finally decide which theme you need, buy it by following these instructions:

1. Log in to the admin panel.
2. In the settings section, select Apps and Sales Channels.
3. Go to the Online Store tab in this section and click the Open Sales Channels button.
4. Click Themes, select a theme, and click the Buy button next to it.

You’re done. The only thing left to do is to apply the theme to your website, finalize the settings, and make the new version of your online store available to customers.

Product Preview

The last step is to make sure your products look great in the chosen theme. To switch to the preview mode, do the following:

1. Log in to the admin panel.
2. Go to the Products section.
3. Select the product you need and open its settings.
4. Next to the Save button, you will see a Preview button.
5. Click it to open the product page in a new window.

Pay attention to the image quality, the font in the title and description, and the location of functional elements. Imagine yourself as a user and try to order the product, analyzing the convenience of conversion. Another important tip is to test the page using at least 3-4 different devices to ensure its adaptability.

Where to Find Reliable Shopify Themes and Experts

You will find many beautiful and functional themes in the official marketplace and on specialized websites. But it’s not enough to choose a Shopify theme — you need to adapt it to your corporate identity and business model. It can be challenging to do this on your own. That’s why it’s better to involve real professionals — specialists from Voodoo Digital.

We will help you finalize a ready-made theme or develop a new one from scratch. Our experts will take care of its comprehensive optimization in terms of design, search engine optimization, functionality, and loading time. Voodoo Digital is ready to provide support even after the launch or migration of your online store, taking care of the success of your business.