When setting up your online store, choosing the right theme is essential to creating a successful and visually appealing website. Your storefront theme is the foundation of your site, and it plays a crucial role in providing an excellent user experience for your customers. It sets the tone for your brand and helps you stand out from the competition. Therefore, optimizing your digital store with the right customizing theme or a detailed product description can help you to take your business in the right direction. This blog will discuss and explore seven factors to help you choose the right theme for your BigCommerce store. But before choosing the right theme, let’s look at the difference between a theme and a framework in BigCommerce.
Themes vs. Frameworks: Which is Which?
BigCommerce themes are based on Stencil, which is its templating engine and language – that makes it support both a theme and a framework. Now, the theme is a fully built store, which means you can get started with your sales right after you install it without any further development scope. On the other hand, the framework is a collection of elements you can use to create your store. Frameworks can comprise basic templates for each component, like product pages that need additional development for the final design.
Now that we have touched upon the basic differences between themes and frameworks, let’s take a look at the seven crucial components that you need to consider while choosing a theme for your online store:
#1 Figure Out Your Budget
Before even starting to shop for themes, the first important thing to realize is to set the budget for different aspects of your online store. In general, BigCommerce themes initially start from $150 onwards, but as you explore, you’ll find a wide range of free and low-cost options available for BigCommerce. However, please note that many free themes do not allow many functionalities for customization to support your business in the long term. Therefore it is essential to keep a lookout on how much access you get in your chosen theme, irrespective of the price point.
#2 Consider Your Brand Identity
Choosing an online store theme that aligns with your brand identity is important because it helps establish your brand’s personality, makes your website more engaging and memorable to your target audience, and helps you stand out from your competitors. Consider your brand’s personality and the emotions you want to evoke in your customers. Do you want to come across as fun and playful or professional and authoritative? Your theme should be consistent with your brand’s values, messaging, and tone of voice. For this, you need to:
- Clearly understand your brand identity, including your brand’s personality, values, and visual identity.
- Look for themes designed that align with your brand identity. Pay attention to the theme’s layout, color scheme, typography, and imagery to ensure they match your brand identity.
#3 Look for Mobile Responsiveness
In today’s digital age, more and more customers are using mobile devices to shop online. Mobile orders account for over 54.53% of website traffic worldwide in the second quarter of 2021. That’s why choosing a mobile-responsive theme is crucial, meaning it’s optimized for smartphones and tablets. A mobile-responsive theme will ensure your website looks great on any device, giving a seamless user experience to customers while improving customer engagement and retention. Also, mobile responsiveness contributes to your business’s search engine optimization capabilities, as a mobile-responsive online store can improve its visibility and drive more traffic to the site, thus enhancing search engine visibility.
#4 Choose a User-Friendly Design
Your website’s user-friendliness is defined by its balance between its user-friendliness and aesthetics. Your theme should be easy to navigate, with a clear and simple layout that guides your customers through your website. Your site’s design should make it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for and encourage them to purchase. Themes having cluttered designs that overwhelm visitors with too much information should be avoided. Instead, ensure that your site’s navigation is intuitive and straightforward.
#5 Looking Out For Customization
While plenty of themes are available, certain themes are focused on domains and industries. Therefore, when you choose a theme that reflects your brand identity, you also need the flexibility to customize the changes and adjustments according to your needs. Whether for launching a new product line, scaling up operations, or giving offers. This future scope of curating personalized customer experience should also be considered while choosing an online store theme. To customize your theme further, you can choose to hire experts in BigCommerce theme development from trusted and reliable partner agencies like CodeClouds. Their work has been recognized by trusted platforms like Clutch as they provide everything from custom checkout, store development, eCommerce platform migrations, enterprise solutions development, and more.
#6 Consider Loading Speed
Loading speed is a critical factor in the success of your online store. Slow loading times can cause frustration for customers, leading to higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates. Choose a theme optimized for speed, with clean code and minimal bloat. You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to test the loading speed of different themes and choose the best performance. BigCommerce gives you an unparalleled frontend experience, tailoring your site for a premium brand experience with good content and a matching speed.
#7 SEO Optimization Capabilities
A good theme should be optimized for search engines, so your website can rank higher in search engine results. Themes control the code for your entire website. Whether adding meta tags for images or supporting basic SEO practices, the chosen theme should be SEO-friendly in all its elements and facilitate its indexing by the crawlers. BigCommerce comes with its inbuilt SEO features such as:
- Optimized URLs: BigCommerce ensures that each URL will be SEO-friendly for a product, category, and other pages, as well as customize your URL settings.
- Unique URLs: Each online store page has a unique URL.
- Microdata: BigCommerce also provides the option for snippets that are inbuilt into your digital store’s product pages for advanced search result listings, with data like ratings, pricing, etc.
Takeaway:
In conclusion, choosing the right theme for your BigCommerce store is essential to creating a successful and visually appealing website. By considering your budget, brand identity, mobile responsiveness, user-friendliness, customization options, loading speed, and reading reviews and ratings, you can choose a theme optimized for your online store’s success. With the right theme, you’ll be able to stand out from the competition and grow your business to reach its true potential. You can also use professional developers’ help to grow your conversion rates. Happy BigCommerce-ing to you!
