How To Choose The Best Shopify Theme For Your Store

1. Consider your niche

Choosing a Shopify theme is not as simple as picking the one with the most positive reviews, or the most aesthetically pleasing. What has worked for others may not work for your store. Different themes are designed for different types of industries. Some themes are designed for simpler products such as art pieces, you can’t use the same theme for composite products such as electronics. You would need to set up numerous categories and subcategories which are not available in the art theme.

You can get themes for your food business, health and beauty, home decor, and even drop-shipping.

Fortunately, Shopify allows you to filter themes by industry when browsing the themes for your store. Most developers provide a stand-alone demo version of the themes, which you can try out and see if it is the best for your store.

2. Decide on your budget

Shopify has both free and premium themes, and the premium themes have different prices. These themes tend to have monthly plans ranging from basic to advanced versions, with the latter costing more. If you’re just getting started with Shopify or you’re on a tight budget, you can choose a free theme. You can still do a lot with a free theme to personalise it to fit your brand, but not at the level offered by paid themes. Free themes are still a fantastic option because they have been built by Shopify’s developers. They ensure these themes are on point and they are always available for customer support.

Paid themes give you so much more control, allowing you to get extremely detailed with your designs and settings. Paid themes offer added capabilities such as animations, product image sliding or pop up on hover, changing the spacing between letters, and more. So if you want to have these features in your store, you must choose a paid theme and select one that has pricing plans within your budget.

The cost of paid Shopify themes ranges from $250 - $350. You must be willing to part with this amount to get the features that the free versions do not provide. The good thing about this is that you only pay once to purchase these themes. You don’t have to stress about monthly fees.

3. Have a list of the key features you want in your store

Before setting up your Shopify store, you should have a vision of what it should look like. Shopify themes are just tools that enable this vision to come to life. That being said, you should have a list of the key features you would want for your store.

• Do you want column configurations for your pages?
• Do you want background images on the footer?
• Do you need landing pages, a blog, or forms?

Then you can choose a theme that offers these features. Usually, you will not get a theme with all these features, assuming you will have a much longer list than the one above. So you should choose one that has the most features you’re looking for to cut down the cost of custom design by developers. This is why it is important to first go through the theme’s preview page before choosing it.

4. Give priority to themes available on the Shopify theme store

Shopify allows you to bring in themes from other theme marketplaces. However, we recommend that you choose a theme from the Shopify theme store, and here’s why.

Shopify has a team of developers who are dedicated to ensuring users get a quality and secure theme. Before a theme is uploaded to the theme store, this team takes it through multistep stages to ensure it can deliver the best experience for you and your customers. Also, these themes have been optimized to be compatible with Shopify and other Shopify apps.

5. Prioritize a simplified checkout process

As an e-commerce merchant, checkout is most important to you because this is where money exchanges hands and you get revenue. Research shows that an average of 75% of customers abandon their carts at checkout. A complex checkout process is one of the major contributors to this.

For this reason, you must choose a theme that has simple but optimized checkout. This includes:

• A well designed ‘Add to Cart’ button, 
• Fewer form fields on the customer details page,
• Mobile-friendly, and more.

To put it simply, choose a theme that makes your store’s checkout process as easy as possible.

6. Prioritize lightweight and mobile-friendly themes

Customers are becoming more impatient, therefore, your store needs to be fast enough for them to use without getting frustrated. If your theme slows down your online store, you will have high bounce rates and low conversions. This is why it is important to give priority to lightweight themes.

Although having features like animations on your store please the eye, they tend to reduce the speed of your website. Long loading periods will repel a significant portion of your customers. This can also affect your SEO rankings. Lightweight themes on the other hand tend to avoid these features and focus solely on performance Lightweight themes often have a simple design that helps customers to navigate your store easily.

Customers will browse your store using different devices including mobile phones, tablets, and computers. It is important to pick a theme that supports responsive design so that your store works the same way across all devices.

These are some important things to consider when acquiring a Shopify theme for your store. 

There are other features that you also should look for in the theme to help your store grow and be successful. These are:

• SEO tools - to help your store rank high in search engine results so that your customers can easily find you. 
• Ample size on the product catalog page - to help your customers find their preferred products faster. 
• Language and translation support - if you intend to explore international markets.

Now that you know what to look for in your Shopify theme, which theme should you choose for your store?