How to Make Your Shopify Store Mobile Friendly: Top Tips
If you’re not wondering how to make your Shopify store mobile friendly yet, you should be.
The widespread adoption of mobile commerce is prompting online retailers to rethink how they build and manage their digital stores. In 2024, studies show that US mobile commerce sales drive around $558.29 billion in revenue, and are responsible for 7.4% of all retail sales.
As the functionality of smartphones continues to evolve, and consumers spend more time tethered to their devices, Shopify store owners can’t afford to overlook the importance of a mobile-optimized experience. Although many Shopify themes, and the world-leading Shopify checkout are already optimized for mobile, it’s worth taking a few extra steps to support your store’s success.
How to Check if Your Shopify Store is Mobile Friendly
If you want to learn how to make your Shopify store mobile friendly, the first step is to check how “responsive” your site already is. The good news is that Shopify already supports mobile-focused businesses, with responsive themes and applications.
However, there are various factors that can influence the mobile friendliness of your store, from how you load images, to how you build checkout forms. You can get a basic insight into your store’s “mobile friendliness” in three ways:
- Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly test: The Google Mobile-Friendly test will check the usability of your website on mobile devices, and give you a performance score, as well as tips for how you can improve your Shopify site.
- Page Speed Insights: Google’s Page Speed Insights can also offer insights into your store’s performance, page loading times, and more on both desktop and mobile devices. You can use this feature for free with your Google account.
- Visit your Shopify store: You can also simply visit your Shopify store as if you were a customer using your mobile device. Navigate through the process of making a purchase and take notes about any issues.
How to Make Your Shopify Store Mobile Friendly
If you discover your Shopify store isn’t quite as mobile-friendly as you’d hoped, don’t panic. There are plenty of great ways you can upgrade the experience for your users.
- Create a Sticky Navigation Bar
The right navigation experience is crucial to success on any Shopify store. While a comprehensive mega menu or slide-in navigation bar can be ideal for a desktop visitor, it isn’t always the right choice for mobile. Since your customers are going to swiping and scrolling down the page, they need an easy way to access your menu whenever they need it.
A sticky navigation bar, or fixed navigation bar is a great way to ensure users don’t have to scroll all the way back to the top of the page whenever they want to visit a new part of your site. You can implement sticky navigation bars easily with the use of the right theme, or you can get your Shopify designer or developer to implement the feature for you.
https://resources.storetasker.com/shopify-examples/selfmade-menu
- Highlight your Product Photography
The success of apps like TikTok and Instagram tells us that most mobile browsers are looking for a highly visual experience. While great product descriptions can help increase your conversion rates, it’s your photography that’s really going to grab customer attention on mobile.
With that in mind, design a Shopify store that draws attention to your unique product photography on your home pages and product pages. Make sure each category page is organized with a simple grid of images, and minimal copy.
https://resources.storetasker.com/shopify-examples/xov-collections-photography
It’s also worth ensuring your images are properly optimized for mobile screens. Look at how images are cropped and loaded on your Shopify store, and make sure the design of your store isn’t affected by images when customers are browsing on mobile devices. You may also want to compress your image sizes, to ensure that they don’t lead to slow loading times.
- Optimize Page Loading Speeds
The speed with which your Shopify sites and its pages load is crucial to online success. However, if you want to learn how to make your Shopify store mobile friendly, you should be focusing on page loading speeds more than most. After all, no-one wants to wait around waiting for something to load when they’re browsing on their smartphone.
Switch comprehensive header videos with static images to avoid longer loading times, and make sure your videos don’t play automatically on mobile devices if you’re using them.
https://resources.storetasker.com/shopify-examples/totem-hero
You can also boost your chances of faster loading times by compressing and resizing images, choosing a fast Shopify theme, and utilizing AMP technology.
- Enhance your CTA Buttons
The right CTA buttons can make or break your chances of converting customers on your Shopify store. However a lot of vendors forget to optimize these buttons for mobile. First, make sure your mobile tap targets are optimized. Don’t opt for extremely small button sizes or standard hypertext links. Make it easy for customers to tap whatever they want.
Next, ensure your CTA buttons contrast with the rest of your store design on your product pages, home pages, and landing pages, so they’re easy to see.
One particularly good way to boost your chances of conversions is to add a sticky CTA to your product pages, so it can appear wherever your customers are scrolling. This is a small but effective way to ensure your customers aren’t left searching for buttons.
- Choose Fonts Carefully, and Limit Text
As mentioned above, consumers on mobile respond better to images than text, so it’s a good idea to use as little copy as possible on your pages. Ideally, you’ll want to ensure your paragraphs are short, and that you’re using numbered or bulleted lists where possible.
However, while reducing your text is important, you’re still going to need at least some copy on your website, from your product descriptions, to your FAQ pages. With this in mind, make sure you’re choosing the right font for your mobile customers.
https://resources.storetasker.com/shopify-examples/jibby-pdp
Larger fonts that are easy to read on any device are an excellent choice. Think between 12-14 points for most text. You could also consider installing a Shopify app that allows customers to change the font size on their screens. This is a good way to boost the accessibility of your store too.
- Cut Down on Pop-Ups
On your standard website, pop-ups can be an excellent way to increase conversions and attract customer attention. They’re fantastic if you want to get people to sign up for a newsletter, or take advantage of a limited time offer.
https://resources.storetasker.com/shopify-examples/ready-to-hang-popup
However, for mobile users, pop-ups can be a major annoyance. They’re often harder to close on smaller screens, and they can detract from the simplicity of the shopping experience. With this in mind, consider reducing the number of pop-ups you use on your mobile site, or eliminating them completely.
You can always consider adding sticky banners to your site instead, which promote your latest offers, or adding a sticky CTA for your newsletter subscription to the site.
- Perfect the Checkout Experience
Finally, the Shopify checkout is one of the best in the world, offering a streamlined single-page experience to uses, and excellent fast-paced loading times. It’s also designed to be mobile responsive, so you shouldn’t have to worry too much about converting mobile customers.
https://resources.storetasker.com/shopify-examples/seed-checkout
However, it’s still up to you to ensure the checkout experience is as excellent as possible for your consumers. While there are limitations to how much you can customize without the help of a Shopify developer and a Shopify Plus account, there are some strategies you can try like:
- Reducing form fields so customers don’t have to enter much information.
- Offering guest checkout options so users can check out faster.
- Using one-click checkout options with solutions like Shop Pay.
- Offering multiple payment options on the checkout page.
- Making the checkout button easy to find
You can A/B test different versions of your Shopify checkout for insights into which strategy drives the best conversions from your mobile shoppers.
Make Sure your Shopify Site is Mobile Friendly
Learning how to make your Shopify store mobile friendly should be a priority for any ecommerce vendor. These days, a huge number of customers are likely to be visiting your website from their mobile device. If they don’t get an excellent experience when they’re browsing on mobile, then they’re more likely to abandon your store, and their purchase.
To make matters worse, a bad mobile experience could convince customers to avoid visiting your website in the future. Plus, since Google is mobile-first, a non-responsive store could mean your site starts to drop down in the search engine result page rankings.
Use the strategies above to ensure you can continue to capture and convert customers on your Shopify store, regardless of which device they use to visit. Alternatively, if you need help optimizing your online store for mobile devices, reach out to the Storetasker team today.
Our Shopify Experts can help you with everything from creating sticky headers and CTA buttons, to creating fully optimized Shopify themes.
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