Starting from scratch, Shopify's 30-day store tutorial - Day 17

When your website loads slowly, visitors will get angry and leave because it takes a long time to load. Once they leave, it is obvious that they will not buy your products.

Why is your store website loading slowly? The most common reason for a slow loading website is too many applications.

You only load the apps you absolutely have to use, and you can review and disable the apps that slow down website loading one by one to determine if you really need it.

You may wonder if website loading speed really has such a big impact on sales? It really does! Common Panda soon saw a surge in sales after removing several applications that slowed down the store's website loading speed.

Sellers who don’t know how well their website is loading can use tools.pingdom.com to test their website speed and find out exactly what issues are slowing it down.

Changing your store theme will not only make your website look brand new, but it will also increase your conversion rate because the new theme may resonate better with your visitors.

As a new Shopify seller, you may be worried about whether you have to redo all your previous settings when you change the theme. Don’t worry, whenever you change your Shopify theme, your previous settings will still be there.

Common Panda launched the store with the “Shopify Booster” theme, and then installed and activated the “Shoptimized” theme, and tested it to see how visitors responded.

• In the Shopify store backend, click "Online Store" and then select "Theme";

• Then at the bottom of the page, you will see more themes "More Themes", just click "Upload Theme" to upload the theme you just downloaded;

• Now, on the same theme page, you will see “Theme Names” below the theme you just uploaded;

• Click Customize and edit any existing settings to your liking. Using a new theme is also a good time to test your store's theme colors, so switch to a new theme and color scheme and test it out;

• After saving your edits, next to your store theme’s name, click “Actions” and select “Publish” and that’s it! Your new theme is now live.

Finally, remember to go through and review all of your product and checkout pages to make sure the look and feel of each product page is how you want it.

More and more consumers view product details and place orders directly on their mobile phones.

Shopify already offers mobile-friendly themes, but you still need to make sure your product and checkout pages work the way you want on mobile devices:

Click "Online Store" and select the theme to open the theme from the Shopify backend.

Now select “Customize” next to the theme name;

Under All Colors and Page Elements, click the phone icon to preview how your store will look on a mobile device screen.

It is recommended that you preview and modify at the same time, so that you can make better adjustments and not ignore any small problems that may cause you to lose sales.

That’s it for Day 17 of the Shopify tutorial. Today we learned three tips on how to improve the Shopify store experience and thus increase conversion rates. Have you learned them all? What will we learn in the next tutorial? Stay tuned.