10+ ways to make your Shopify store mobile friendly

With the increasing use of smartphones and tablets for online shopping, it’s important to ensure that you make your Shopify store mobile friendly.

This blog will share tips and strategies for making your Shopify store more user-friendly for mobile users. From simple design changes to advanced technical solutions, we’ve got you covered. Whether you’re a small business owner or a seasoned e-commerce professional, you’ll find valuable insights and practical advice to help improve the mobile experience for your customers. So, let’s get started and make sure your Shopify store is ready for the best possible Shopify Mobile Optimization!

When do you need to make your Shopify store mobile friendly?

Before exploring tips and strategies for mobile friendliness, let’s check whether you need optimization for your Shopify store.

Impaired performance on SEO: A mobile-optimized Shopify website has been preferred by search engines, notably Google, since the introduction of mobile-first indexing in July 2019. This means a mobile-friendly site will rank higher when searched on a mobile device. If your Shopify store is not optimized for mobile, it may not be easily found by potential customers, putting your business at risk of obscurity.

Decreased Sales: A non-mobile-friendly Shopify website can be challenging to navigate on mobile devices, leading to slow loading times and other obstacles that can cause potential customers to lose interest. This can result in a decrease in sales for your business.

Damage to Brand Image: A poor mobile experience on your Shopify website can also harm your brand image. Negative word-of-mouth can spread, damaging your reputation and making it less likely for customers to recommend your business. Maintaining a positive brand image is crucial for the success of any business, so it’s essential to make sure your Shopify store is mobile-friendly.

If you are experiencing any of these, you should start working on optimizing your Shopify store to make it more mobile-friendly.

Mobile-Friendly Test

First of all, try a mobile-friendly test for your Shopify store. There are basically three ways to test your mobile usability on your website. It won’t take long, so give it a try.

1. Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Google’s mobile-friendly test provides a mobile usability score on your website and some guidelines to help website owners make it mobile-friendly. You can test your website just by entering your Shopify store URL. Check this test from https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly.

2. Page Speed Insights

Website owners use Page Speed Insights to analyze the performance of their websites on both mobile and desktop devices. The tool measures the time it takes for the website to load and provides suggestions for how to improve the load time. Page speed is an important metric for user experience on your webshop.

3. Visit your Shopify store as if you are a customer

Even though technological aspects are crucial for your mobile friendliness on your Shopify store, unmeasurable factors also play essential roles. Therefore, we recommend you visit your Shopify store as if you are a customer to find mobile usability from your experience.

For example, color, navigation system, button alignment, or image effectiveness are things Google can’t check for you. Therefore, the fastest way to check your mobile UX(user experience) is to experience it as if you are a customer.

10+ Tips for mobile friendly Shopify Store

We introduce 10+ tips to make your Shopify store more mobile-friendly. When you consider mobile optimization, there are three pillars: SEO, UI, and UX.

Pillar 1: SEO

Mobile SEO is important for Google because a majority of internet users access the web on their mobile devices. Google has also stated that they give preference to websites that are mobile-friendly in their search results. This means that a website optimized for mobile devices is more likely to rank higher in Google’s search results when someone accesses the web on a mobile device.

1. Optimize images

Image optimization is necessary for mobile SEO because it can significantly impact the load time of a webpage on a mobile device. Large, unoptimized images can slow down the loading of a webpage, leading to a poor user experience. Slow-loading pages can also result in a higher bounce rate and lower engagement.

Optimizing images can reduce the total size of a webpage, making it load faster on a mobile device. This can improve the user experience, increase engagement, and lower bounce rates, which are all important factors in mobile SEO.

Additionally, Google uses page load time as a ranking factor, so a website with a faster load time will likely rank higher in search results. Optimizing image size can also help mobile-friendly websites to rank higher in Google’s search results.

Here’s a checklist for image size optimization:

a. Use proper image size

If you use images that have larger sizes than necessary, you should resize them. Especially for eCommerce websites, there are plenty of product images. Resizing those images often results in a huge page speed improvement.

b. Image format

Image file types significantly affect page speed. There are mainly four image formats: PNGs, GIFs, JPGs, and WebPs(details for each format). Each format has its strengths but choosing the wrong image format leads a slow page loading.

3. Compress images

Once you compress images, the size of the image is reduced. If you don’t mind using compressed images, we recommend you compress images for faster page loading.

Check more: https://www.shopify.com/blog/7412852-10-must-know-image-optimization-tips

2. Remove unnecessary code

You should check whether your website contains unused Javascript or CSS code.

Removing unused JavaScript and CSS from a website can improve SEO for several reasons:

Mobile optimization: Unused code can also add unnecessary load on mobile devices, which can be particularly slow in rendering and interpreting the code, leading to poor user experience.

Code Quality: Unused code can make your website source code messy and hard to navigate, making it difficult for search engine spiders to understand and index your website correctly.

Bandwidth: Unused code can consume more bandwidth and make your website less responsive.

Removing unused code can optimize a website for faster load time, better user experience, and improved search engine visibility, which are all important factors in SEO.

You can check it on Page Speed Insights.

Pillar 2: UI(user interface)

The design of your webshop interface should be tailored to mobile usage. Mobile UI(user interface) is different from desktop UI. Here are some tips for mobile eCommerce website design!

3. Readable font

The development of an eCommerce website is normally done on a desktop. That sometimes results in choosing an unreadable font for mobile devices. We need to test how the text looks on mobile devices as well.

Here is a list of readable and popular fonts on mobile.

4. Font Size

Even if your website text is readable from a desktop, that does not mean it can be read on mobile devices. Using too small or too large font size for your design worsens its user experience. There are recommendations for font size.

Body text font size should be at least 16px, with 14px being the smallest used.

Headings should be around 1.3 times larger than the body text to create contrast; for example, if the body text is 16px, headings should be around 21px.

Subheadings are often scaled down from headings but may need to be visually different to avoid looking similar to the body text; this can be achieved through weight, formatting, and letter spacing.

Even though there is a recommendation, you should check them on mobile devices by yourself.

5. Logo Appearance

Is your logo easily recognized on mobile? Is it large enough to tell your brand image? Ensure that the logo is appropriately sized for mobile view and that all icons in the header and footer are visible in their designated locations.

Check: How to Design and Optimize Your Site’s Logo For Mobile

6. Color

The designer should be aware of how the website color looks on mobile devices and how it affects user experience. As an agency, we have seen some webshops designed only for desktop visitors so that it looks neither stylish nor useful on mobile devices.

These are color scheme trends for mobile app design, but you can also use some tips for your eCommerce website: https://www.envato.com/blog/color-scheme-trends-in-mobile-app-design/

Pillar 3: UX

UX(user experience ) for mobile and desktop are completely different. They differ in screen size, interaction, hardware, context, and more. Therefore, we need to differentiate mobile eCommerce design from desktop. Here are some ways to improve your mobile user experience on your Shopify store.

7. Call-to-Action optimization

As mentioned above, mobile and desktop experiences differ in many ways. Hence, the way your site visitors take action also differs. Your call-to-action design should be adjusted to their user experience on mobile. For example, the “Download” button does not work on mobile devices because mobile users do not normally download files to their devices.

Call-to-action optimization is an area that requires a lot of testing and research, as even a single-button design needs a lot of improvement. For example, and this is just one example, the placement of buttons must also take care of the following things.

8. Navigation

The navigation menu design is essential to navigating your site visitors to the right places. You can’t tell them the needed information if your website navigation is not designed well. In fact, there are many more types of navigation menus on mobile, each with its advantages and disadvantages, so choose the best navigation menu with UX in mind.

Check this website: Top 8 Mobile Navigation Menu Design for Your Inspiration

9. Review

Recently, most online shoppers refer to other shoppers’ reviews when they make purchasing decisions. Thus, your Shopify store should have a helpful review system to increase customer loyalty and conversion rate on your website.

For Shopify owners, we recommend Yotpo. Yotpo offers multiple services that can increase customer loyalty, brand advocacy, repeat purchases, and more. You can easily install Yotpo services into your Shopify store.

10. Optimize forms

When you want your website visitors to fulfill their personal information, you need to prepare forms on your eCommerce. However, if the form design is unsuitable for mobile experiences, you can’t expect a high conversion rate through the form.

In fact, the second reason for abandonment during checkout is the inconvenience of the checkout process.

The design of forms directly influences the conversion rate. Easy, intuitive, and smooth experience through forms is what you have to make.

For more info: https://lvivity.com/mobile-form-design-best-practices

11. Helpdesk

Solving customers’ questions affects user experience positively for sure. Good customer services bring a good user experience to your eCommerce. We recommend Gorgias for your helpdesk. Gorgias is the e-commerce helpdesk where you can quickly respond to customer questions.

Conclusion

As the importance of mobile-friendly design has increased in these years, marketers and developers need to consider improving the mobile user experience for your Shopify store. We introduced 10+ tips to have a better mobile user experience; however, there are more areas you should care about for mobile usability.

Thank you for reading this blog. For your information, Flatline Agency can help you design and develop high-quality eCommerce websites for your products & services. If you are interested in improving your eCommerce website, let’s have a talk with our team!