Building your very own Shopify store is one of the most exciting parts of starting an e-commerce business. We know firsthand how cool it is to get it all set up!
Unfortunately, many store owners get a bit carried away when they build their stores. They start out with a plan to make their Shopify store appealing and engaging but end up with some serious design blunders that damage their sales.
In this post, we’re covering some of the worst offenders in store design. While you should always test what works on your specific store, avoiding these pitfalls will make sure your store looks great and converts well.
1. Huge Logo With Too Much Padding
You may adore your sleek, sexy logo, but featuring it more prominently won’t move your customers to action.
A logo doesn’t convert traffic – content does. A logo that takes up too much space can be a distraction for your visitors, drawing them away from the content and calls to action their eye should be focused on.
Even worse? Surrounding a large logo with excessive padding. Screen space is limited. A giant logo surrounded by padding takes up valuable space you could be using for your key messaging or directive.
The other problem with this kind of layout is that it forces visitors to scroll to get to the good stuff. This makes them much more likely to bounce (leave your site) before they get to the next action you want them to take, further down the page.
Here’s an example of what not to do (see how you can barely tell what the store is about?):
2. Too Many Popups
You’ve probably seen this one before. You land on a website and get hit with a popup from every direction. An email subscription popup jumps out immediately, followed by an animated shipping popup from the top, a vertical support tab from the right, and a chat window peeking out from the bottom.
This level of bombardment will make many visitors close the page before they ever engage with any of the content. For other visitors, the paradox of choice (having too many options to ever make a decision) will be paralyzing.
This is not the experience you want to create for potential customers.
Popups are great for getting subscriptions and engaging first-time visitors, but there are a few things you should do to make them valuable, rather than annoying.
Use a time delay setting on your subscription popup, so visitors don’t feel assaulted upon arrival. Using smaller popups instead of giant page-consuming ones also makes visitors more likely to engage with your offer, rather than just clicking away from it.
Here’s what not to do:
3. Too Many Sliders
Using landing page sliders is a popular trend these days, but they often do more harm than good. Like giant logos, sliders are distracting and keep visitors from taking the next action you want from them on your site.
Sliders require visitors to consume content in a very unnatural way. Most visitors get stuck on them. They try to read content that is displayed too briefly or get frustrated waiting for the next message that’s taking too long to load.
This prevents them from exploring what your site is actually about. Unfortunately, store owners not only continue to use sliders, but they put their key messaging in them, only for that critical content to be overlooked by visitors.
Here’s a stock example of what not to do. If you only have 3 or 4 seconds per image, it’s hard to grasp what each image and its text means:
Over the course of working with hundreds of Shopify stores, we’ve found that a single image with a clear call to action converts much better than lots of sliders.
Need some hard proof before you get rid of your sliders? ConversionXL together some great research and analysis into why sliders are conversion-killers.
The design is trial and error. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to building your Shopify store – you have to test what works for you. However, starting with the best practices will always give you an advantage.
In a couple of weeks, we’ll be bringing you even more design tips to make your store convert as effectively as possible. Bookmark this post and make sure you come back to it soon.
Thank you again for following our Shopify Insider Blog @ Blackbelt Commerce, we have many other valuable and informative posts that will help you to continue to optimize your website such as Best Shopify Resources For Boosting Your Stores, Boost Your Sales With These Cool Tools how to back up your shopify store, how to hardness the hottest e-commerces trends/2019, and The Easy Upsell.
Have questions? Drop a comment below and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.