How many times were you stuck with a decision in picking up right Magento theme for your online store? Having too many options, many beautiful Magento themes out there in the market, it's hard to decide which theme you should go for.
In this blog post, I am going to share 9 tips that may be of help to choose the right eCommerce theme for your online Magento store.
Your eCommerce site wants you to read this so badly!
#1: Search for the rational Look and Feel
Visual effect matters, as it affects the first impression in your shoppers' eyes. Take your time at this stage.
If your store is about handmade products, a Magento theme with willowy lines and pastel gamut will be heart winning. If you own an e-store for urban clothing, your site should have block colors and contains lots of bold typos.
You can look at the demo content and images of a theme as they can tell you which product site that theme can fit for or the theme tags from providers can be a good reference. Of course you should not rely on them too much as one theme may fit in perfectly various types of product ranges with a little touch of customization. The best way to figure it out is playing around the demo sites, feel the theme to see if it can truly represent your site.
#2: Go for a user-friendly interface
Being stunning is not enough, a good Magento theme should be clean and has a friendly interface to convince shoppers.
A user-friendly interface contains many things: a handy Back-to-Top button, the sticky Shopping Cart, a good navigation system, an auto-hide menu panel or so forth.
In short, find a Magento theme that can give your shoppers the interactive feeling in the best caring way.
#3: Trendy or Classic
Depending on which industry and products you are in, you can choose if you want to have a store with slick and trendy design or go for a traditional and classic web design.
If you sell digital products, then flat design is a way to go. Or for fashion industry, clean and slick theme design will be the choice. Thus, look around and find yourself a good Magento theme provider whose eCommerce themes are up-to-date.
#4: Blocks and spaces for banners and promotions
There would be no online shop without a banner ad or a promotion ad. This is also one of the factors that you should consider in choosing your theme. A masshead can grab attention of your visitors and the good placement of promotional blocks will help you deliver effective messages.
#5: Theme customization?
You should check if a theme can be customized or not as this will help you to personalize your site easily. Even the most beautiful eCommerce theme can be out of fashion after a season or a promotion campaign. Having a practical tool to customize the colors or layouts of the site helps you to save time, money and energy getting a whole new Magento theme.
For example, in our Magento themes, we support an extension called JM Basetheme. This is a powerful tool which allows you to customize from color to layout, from background to footer at ease.
>> Read more about our powerful theme customization tool – JM Basetheme. <<
#6: Web browsers compatibility
Check the cross-browser compatibility in advance before picking up your next eCommerce Magento theme. This is not likely to happen with most of the popular Magento theme providers, but be careful. It would be a waste if your theme does not work well in all popular web browsers, as user preference in terms of web browsers vary a lot.
>> Should you need a tool to test the compability of your theme, head over to browsershots.org. <<
#7: Your theme should be SEO-friendly
The Magento core is SEO-friendly already, phew! Your eCommerce Magento theme should follow the standard coding pratice to be compelling in search engines’ robot eyes. Thus, you had better check it out first to make sure the theme you want is clean and organized in term of HTML/CSS code. >> For more tips about SEO, you can read our blog post about this.
#8: Mobilize your eCommerce site
I have discussed it in one of our Mobile Commerce blog post, as it is growing extensively and you should mobilize your e-store to boost up your business sales. A responsive theme will help you to support customers right on their go mode.
So supporting responsive design in theme is a must now. Also take a further look on the responsive functions of your wanted Magento theme such as Off-canvas navigation or menu, accordion effects on lists or tabs and so on.
#9: Be connected with social channels
A practical Magento theme should come with social settings so that your shoppers can get updated and share about your site at ease. Also look for an eCommerce Magento theme with social update features like getting updates from fan pages or latest tweets from your Twitter account.
Wrapping it up, above are 9 basic tips while determining a suitable Magento theme for your online store. Of course there are many other factors which affect your decision. Please feel free to share your insights as we would love to assist you more!