Best Practices for Shopify Theme Development

In the dynamic world of eCommerce, your Shopify theme is the digital storefront that reflects your brand identity and customer experience. Developing a top-notch Shopify theme requires a mix of creativity, technical skill, and adherence to best practices. In this article, we have discussed the best practices for Shopify theme development. So, let’s delve into the topic.

What are Custom Shopify Themes?

Shopify themes are pre-designed templates that define an online store’s layout, functionality, and style. They are responsible for your store’s aesthetics and customer experience. Custom themes offer flexibility, branding opportunities, and tailored user experiences that pre-built themes may not provide. They help businesses stand out and connect more effectively with their target customers.

How to Create Your Shopify Theme?

Shopify theme development is a step-by-step process. Test your theme by setting up a development store. Learn Shopify’s templating language, Liquid, to easily manage the theme’s features. Add custom designs and features to make the theme flexible, giving store owners full control over their store. Shopify theme creation improves the looks and functionality of an online store. By customizing Shopify themes, you can develop unique requirements for your store.

When starting theme development, consider the theme’s code, as it affects the store’s performance and user experience. Using Shopify’s reference or free themes is a great way to build a strong base for your custom theme. Making small adjustments and adding unique features can help your theme stand out.

Key Points to Consider During Shopify Theme Development

• Templates, Sections, and Blocks: You can use Shopify’s theme structure to build a flexible and customizable theme that helps business owners achieve their goals. Know the key points to consider when breaking down theme templates into sections and blocks and how detailed your theme components should be.
• Performance: Performance is an important factor in helping merchants in their success journey and ensuring a great customer experience. Find out how to improve and test your theme’s performance.
• Accessibility: Discover how to make your theme more accessible to provide a seamless experience for merchants and their customers.
• Design: Explore the key principles of creating a good theme design that meets the needs of the business owners and customers.

Best Practices for Shopify Theme Development

Create a great customer experience and ensure that the online stores are fast, easy to use, and easy to find. Consider the factors below for the best Shopify theme development.

Avoiding Misleading Coding Techniques

As a partner and developer, do not use any misleading practices like hiding the code or trying to manipulate search engines.

Using Theme Tools and Build Tools

Implement best practices to build strong processes by using development tools.

• Version Control: Learn how to apply version control to Shopify themes and manage the source and compiled code.
• File Transformation: If you prefer using your coding style and tools while working with Shopify themes, check out these best practices. They explain how to transform theme files and the benefits of doing it.

Reduce the Use of JavaScript

Build your theme mostly with HTML and CSS. Do not depend on JavaScript for basic functions like searching for or buying products. Use JavaScript only as an added feature when HTML or CSS cannot do the job. Try to use CSS for interactive elements, as it loads faster than JavaScript.

Avoid Namespace Collisions

Namespaces help you organize variables into separate containers, preventing collisions in the global scope. However, JavaScript minifiers often shorten variable names, which can still lead to collisions. To avoid this, wrap your JavaScript values inside a function scope. Variables defined within a function scope stay limited to that function and won’t collide with other variables.

Do not Depend on External Frameworks and Libraries

If you need to use JavaScript, avoid using third-party frameworks, libraries, or dependencies. Instead, use built-in browser features and modern DOM APIs. Adding libraries can increase bundle sizes, reduce loading times, and provide a poor customer experience.

Frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue and large libraries like jQuery can significantly impact performance. Also, avoid adding polyfills for outdated browsers. You can use a browser list to target browsers with more than 1% market share.

Avoid Parser-blocking Scripts

Parser-blocking scripts prevent the browser from building and displaying the full page until the script is completely loaded, parsed, and run. This decreases page loading time and affects key metrics. Use the defer or async attributes on your script tags to avoid such problems.

Preload Key Resources

Preloading resources will start downloading them before they are needed. Delaying the loading of certain resources and using system resources can reduce the size of the initial download, allowing customers to interact with the page faster.

Use resource hints

Use one of the following methods and add up to two resource hints per template code.

• The preload-tag filter
• The preload keyword argument on the stylesheet-tag or image-tag filters

When Shopify loads a page with preload instructions, it will include a preload hint in the Link header for future requests. You should use resource hints only when necessary.

Use System Font

Using a system font means the browser cannot download an extra file before displaying the text on the store.

Load Non-critical Resources on Interaction.

Your page might have unused code for components or resources. You can load these only when the user interacts with them, which can avoid unnecessary loading code.

Use Responsive Images

Large images can frustrate the user, so use responsive images to reduce the loading time. Specifying an image size allows you to download the smallest image needed without losing quality. The store requests the image in the right size, so the file downloaded from the CDN is smaller, reducing the need for the browser to scale the image.

An image-tag filter can be used to add responsive images to the theme. This filter automatically provides a set of image sizes, which you can adjust using the “sizes” keyword.

Optimize Liquid Code

You can edit most of the Liquid code used to build your store. There are efficient and non-efficient ways to write liquid code. Repeating complex operations can slow down your store. Use the Shopify Theme Inspector for Chrome to find the lines of code slowing down your online store.

Use Theme Check to Detect Performance Issues

You can use Theme Check to find potential performance problems in your theme code, such as large CSS and JS files, links to remote assets, and JavaScript that blocks the page from loading.

Test for Performance

Shopify has a Web Performance Dashboard and Reports that help you understand how your store is performing. Using real-time data, it shows you important metrics called Core Web Vitals. This tool gives you better performance insights and tips on how to improve your store’s speed.

Use Lighthouse CI for Early Detection of Performance Issues

Use continuous integration (CI) for your theme development. You can add a CI check to ensure that changes to your theme don’t affect your performance score. You can do this with the Shopify Lighthouse CI GitHub action, which uploads your theme to a test shop and measures its speed score.

Review the Store’s Performance

You can check the performance of the stores you manage on the Store Performance page in your Shopify Dashboard. Access it by logging into your Partner Dashboard, going to the Stores page, and clicking “View store performance.”

Conclusion

Building a great Shopify theme means focusing on design, speed, and functionality. By following the best practices mentioned above, you can create a theme that improves user experience and helps increase sales. Unlock the full potential of your Shopify store with Ayatas Technologies! We offer expert Shopify Development Services, ensuring an exceptional experience for merchants and customers. We’ve got you covered, from improving your store’s Core Web Vitals to implementing efficient coding practices. Contact us today to boost your store’s performance and drive success!