Launching a Shopify store can be overwhelming for new business owners, and there are a lot of mistakes you can make here. But the good news is that if you are making your store in 2022, you have the latecomers advantage.
That means you can look at other peoples’ mistakes and avoid making those in your store.
This article will discuss the top 10 mistakes that people often make when designing their Shopify stores.
Read through the list and make sure that you’re not making any of them, as that could cost you lost sales.
Top 10 Shopify Website Development Mistakes to Avoid
Here is a non-exhaustive list of mistakes to avoid when setting up your Shopify store:
1. Not Paying Attention to Mobile Design
Mobile commerce is growing. More than 64% of the eCommerce website visits came from mobile in 2019. More and more people are shopping from mobile devices, and you could be losing all that traffic and sales if your store isn’t mobile-friendly.
You should add responsive components to your Shopify website design to fix that. And make your store adaptable to all devices to leverage the traffic coming from multiple sources.
2. Complicated Navigation
The image goes into a store with fifty aisles and no system to guide you where different products are. You’ll end up having to walk each gallery to find the items you’re looking for. Would you want to go back there? No, I bet you won’t.
The same is the case with online stores with terrible navigation. It’s not user-friendly and can cost you a lot of traffic because manually navigating can be frustrating and time-consuming. You can avoid these issues if you hire an efficient Shopify expert for your shop.
3. Bad Image Quality
When customers buy online, they base their purchase on the images they see on your website. Using lower quality images could mean that you’re losing sales because potential customers can’t know for sure what they’re buying.
We understand that many high-quality images can decrease your page load speed. But that’s no reason to use terrible photos. You can shrink the images and reduce the size while maintaining the quality.
The best way to buy a product is to hold it, see its actual colours and look at it from all angles.
And the second-best way is to provide realistic images in the best possible quality to show users what they’ll be getting. That’s all the more important if your products depend on their appearances.
4. Missing a Search Bar
Most users will come to your store by following a link either from the results on search engines or ads on social media. But once they’re in your Shopify store, they might want to check out what more you offer. And having a search bar is critical for this.
Your store won’t be user-friendly without one. Because then your users will have no option to look for products other than scrolling through the different product pages.
The search bar also helps with navigation. If you have a lot of products and your navigation design isn’t the best, then the search bar is the last option where users can look for the products they want.
Once again, not designing a search bar could mean you’re missing out on sales that you could otherwise make.
5. Having Broken Pages
Nothing screams unprofessional and unreliable like a broken page. The eCommerce market is competitive. If your potential customer opens a link and it’s broken, then they won’t think twice about leaving your store and not coming back.
You need to stay on top of broken links and redirect them to dynamic product pages.
6. Bad Checkout Experience
Shopify doesn’t offer too many customization features for the checkout page. But that’s a good thing because it means you can’t go too wrong with it.
Make sure that you include your brand logo somewhere on the checkout page. Use your brand colours and match the font and typography to what you have used elsewhere in your store.
All that’s important because your users should feel like they are still on the same website when they are on the checkout page.
55% of shoppers will abandon the cart if they have a terrible checkout experience, such as entering credit card information or shipping address more than once.
Too often, store owners focus all their attention on the homepage and product pages and neglect the checkout experience.
The last thing you want is for customers to leave your website after reaching the checkout page.
7. Poor Use of Space
Some Shopify designers don’t use white space well. Leaving too much space on the sides of the page or between blocks of texts makes it seem like your website isn’t fully developed yet.
You should strategically use white space to highlight your product descriptions or the actual content on the website.
Use a mix of visual elements along with text and CTA buttons.
8. Lacking a Chat or Help Feature
Do you know why a few helpers are always following you in stores? That’s because most shoppers love having instant help when they need to find products, and it saves their time and makes the experience pleasant.
You’ll find these helpers in all kinds of stores, from a corner supermarket to a Gucci store in France.
You need to offer this feature in your online store to improve the shopping experience.
So include a live chat feature where customer service representatives can help users find products, resolve problems in checkout and answer questions about special offers.
9. Long Page Loading Time
We all know how important page load speed is for the success of your Shopify store. According to Google, 53% of users will leave your store if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Excessive plugins, large images, bad optimization, too many links to images, CCS files, and other factors contributed to a slow page load speed.
If you don’t know how to fix it, you should seek the help of Shopify website development services to help you improve your website.
10. Ignoring SEO
The default SEO settings on your Shopify store might need some changes to optimize your website further.
This includes manually adjusting the SEO titles of your blogs and products and changing meta descriptions to have the text you think is best.
Ignoring SEO can cost you in traffic. So remember to make these changes regularly.
What You Should Do Next
Website development mistakes don’t happen only while you’re initially developing the store, and these can happen even when your store is up and running and attracting visitors.
The best strategy is to be testing your Shopify website constantly. That way, you’ll identify the mistakes before these can cause too much damage.
Doing a soft launch of your website before making it live for the world can help you find some mistakes. You can also take the help of professional developers to make sure that Shopify website development mistakes aren’t the pitfall of your store.
