How to Optimize a Shopify Store for Mobile?

By: Julian Wong

|
Shopify

08 Dec 2023

How to optimize a Shopify store for mobile? - Verz Design

Mobile devices are an essential part of our daily lives in the digital world of today. Mobile optimisation is now a crucial component of operating a successful online business. To ensure a seamless and user-friendly experience for your clients, it’s essential to know how to optimize your Shopify store for mobile devices. Statista estimates that retail mobile commerce sales in the USA will surpass 360 billion dollars in 2021. It goes without saying that every owner of an e-commerce website should be considering how to make their shop as mobile-friendly as possible for both present and potential clients.

In 2024, mCommerce sales will reach $543 billion, accounting for 40.4% of total eCommerce sales, according to Insider Intelligence. It follows that for online businesses, Shopify mobile optimisation is essential.

Summary

  1. What is Shopify Mobile Optimization?
  2. Why is Mobile Optimization Essential for Your Shopify Store?
  3. Understanding the Importance of Mobile-Friendly Design
  4. How to Optimize a Shopify Store for Mobile?
  5. Optimize Your Shopify Website for Mobile with Verz Design!

What is Shopify Mobile Optimization?

Shopify is an online platform that empowers companies to grow and operate their businesses on the web. With the increasing importance of mobile devices, Shopify provides fully-rendered themes that adapt to any screen size. Additionally, mobile-optimized content receives higher rankings in mobile device searches.

However, when it comes to making your website thoroughly mobile-friendly, relying solely on responsiveness isn’t enough. This is where Shopify Mobile Optimization comes into play. Shopify Mobile Optimization is the process of developing and enhancing your Shopify website for mobile devices.

This is essential not only to improve your visitors’ mobile experience but also to avoid these main problems:

  • Low SEO Rankings: Search engines prioritize Shopify websites that are properly optimized for mobile use. In fact, search engines boost mobile-optimized content when searches are performed on mobile devices. Focusing on mobile optimization will help more customers find you.
  • Negative Reputation: When your website isn’t optimized for mobile, it can make your business appear unprofessional, tarnishing your brand image. Not only will visitors be discouraged from navigating an unstructured site, but they also won’t recommend you to others. You could end up losing customers before you’ve even had a chance to make a sale.
  • Decreased Sales: Difficulty in navigating your website, slow loading speeds, and cluttered pages can drive potential customers away, leading to a drop in sales and harm to your business.

Why is Mobile Optimization Essential for Your Shopify Store?

One of the main reasons why mobile optimization is essential for Shopify stores is for improving User Experience. When your website is mobile-friendly, it ensures that clients using smartphones or tablets can simply navigate and engage with your store. This implies that they can quickly find the goods they’re looking for, read the goods’ specifications, and conveniently finish the checkout process. You can boost client satisfaction and raise the likelihood of repeat business by offering a seamless and simple experience.

Mobile optimisation helps to improve the search engine ranking of your store, which is a crucial advantage. Learning how to optimize your Shopify store for mobile can result in higher search result rankings on engines like Google, ultimately increasing your store’s visibility and organic traffic. If your Shopify store is not mobile-optimized, it may rank lower in search engine results pages (SERPs), causing you to lose out on organic traffic and potential sales.

Understanding the Importance of Mobile-Friendly Design

A Shopify store that is optimised for mobile use must have a mobile-friendly design. It entails designing a layout and user interface specifically for touch-based interactions and smaller screens. A mobile-friendly design prioritises optimising the user experience and making sure that your store appears and operates properly across a variety of mobile devices. In addition to enhancing usability, a mobile-friendly design increases your conversion rates & store’s search engine presence.

Having a mobile-friendly design is more crucial than ever due to the rising use of smartphones and tablets. As mentioned earlier, recent studies indicate that a sizable part of online traffic comes from mobile devices, and this tendency is anticipated to continue. Therefore, it is vital for companies to give mobile optimisation top priority in order to satisfy the preferences of their mobile consumers.

How to Optimize a Shopify Store for Mobile?

To optimize your Shopify store for mobile devices, start by selecting a mobile-responsive theme that ensures your website looks great on small screens. Our experts have prepared optimization hacks to boost conversions on your mobile Shopify store.

1) Make your navigation bar accessible

Make your navigation bar accessible

To optimize your online store for mobile users, it’s crucial to ensure that the navigation bar is readily accessible from any page on your website. This user-friendly approach simplifies the browsing experience, enhancing customer satisfaction and potentially leading to higher conversion rates on mobile devices. Prioritizing a seamlessly integrated navigation system across all pages can significantly improve the overall mobile-friendliness of your online store.

2) Adjust visuals for mobile screens

Adjust visuals for mobile screens

Image optimization for mobile devices is essential for all websites. While your Shopify store’s theme may be mobile-friendly, image display can still pose challenges if not optimised. Therefore, one must examine visuals across different devices, including banners, product images, and videos. Ensure they load quickly and appear correctly to provide a seamless and engaging mobile shopping experience, ultimately boosting conversions.

3) Optimize mobile page speed

Optimize mobile page speed

To make your online store a mobile success, you must ensure that it loads quickly.

Here’s how:

  • First, pick a fast-loading Shopify theme for mobile users.
  • Second, make your product images smaller without making them look bad, so they load faster.
  • Lastly, put your videos somewhere else on the internet to avoid slowing down your website. Doing these will make your store’s mobile experience seamless, making customers happier and more likely to buy things.

4) CTA Buttons

Optimise CTA Buttons for your mobile Shopify Store

CTA buttons encourage customers to buy from your store. To make them work better for mobile, try these tips:

  • First, make the buttons bigger, so it’s easy for shoppers to tap on them.
  • Second, use strong words that grab your customers’ attention, like ‘Shop Now’ or ‘Buy Today.’
  • Lastly, test different CTAs to find out which one works best for your store. These small changes can boost your sales on mobile and make shopping easier for your customers. Here is a guide on how you can write CTA button tips to encourage customers to buy from your store.

5) Adjust font size for mobile visibility

Adjust font size for mobile visibility

When you optimise your Shopify store for mobile, remember to use a bigger font size to accommodate for the smaller screen. Aim for fonts that are about 14 to 16 pixels in size. This way, your customers can easily read the product descriptions and other important information on their phones. Making text larger makes shopping on mobile more comfortable and enjoyable for your customers, leading to better experiences and potentially more sales.

6) Fix all layout shifts

Fix all layout shifts

Cumulative Layout Shift is about how much the page moves while it loads. Too much shifting can be annoying for users. A good rule of thumb is to aim for a CLS of 0.1 or less for most of your page visits. Some ways to improve CLS are:

  • Setting the correct width and height on all images
  • Reduce image file sizes and ensure that they are in the correct dimensions
  • Minimise pop-up usage

Understand about CLS

In doing so, the page should load smoothly without jumping around too much, providing a better experience for people browsing on their phones. You can also use extensive JavaScript on your Shopify site to help with this.

7) Highlight product images

Highlight product images for mobile Shopify Store

For your mobile Shopify optimization, it’s crucial to place your products front and center, to accommodate for the limited screen space on mobile devices. Consider leaving behind unnecessary page elements and let your product images take centre stage. Bonus points if your products are consistently photographed and presented in a uniform style. By following this approach, not only does it enhance the user experience, it also significantly boosts the effectiveness of your Shopify store in converting visitors into loyal customers, leading to greater success in the eCommerce world.

8) Avoid pop-ups

Avoid pop-ups

When it comes to pop-ups on mobile sites, we’ve got one word of advice: avoid. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes – pop-ups are already an annoyance on desktop, and on mobile devices, they become downright insufferable. These tend to direct you to an entirely new screen, and your customers might accidentally end up somewhere else instead of buying your product.

Please, spare your customers from this frustration. Prioritize providing a seamless and enjoyable mobile shopping experience by steering clear of intrusive pop-ups. Keep things simple and user-friendly to enhance customer satisfaction and engagement with your online store.

9) Checkout Page

Checkout Page

Now, your Shopify store should be mostly optimised, but there’s one more crucial step for a smooth user experience – the checkout page. You don’t want to lose customers at the very last leg of the journey! Keeping the checkout process simple is vital here. Entering customer details should be easy and checkout buttons should be prominent. Be sure to also offer multiple payment options for easy and convenient purchases. By doing this, you’ll make shopping on mobile devices hassle-free, boosting customer satisfaction and securing sales.

Optimize Your Shopify Website for Mobile with Verz Design!

The widespread usage of mobile devices for surfing the web is something that will only get bigger. Therefore, to stay ahead, it’s important to understand the mobile user’s experience and adapt to stay ahead of the competition.

We hope that the tips outlined in this blog can help you in taking your Shopify store to the next level, but in case you have difficulty implementing them into your Shopify store, feel free to reach out to us! At Verz Design, we are a certified Shopify Plus partner and our team’s ability to optimise and level up your store is second to none. Get in touch at 6841 1680 or email us at [email protected], and our consultants will be more than happy to assist you. Happy optimising!

Share to:

Starting your digital journey with us

With our 13 years proven digital results, we are here to help with your online business success.

Unsubscribe anytime.