Shopify

5 Best Practices To Build Scalable Shopify Themes

Published:

August 16, 2017

5 Best Practices To Build Scalable Shopify Themes

Getting around Shopify is easy for many when they want to launch their store. But once you want to customize it, it can get bit difficult. Sometimes it gets too complicated working on Liquid with too many snippets and codes. However, the result may give a uniquely defined theme for your customer’s online store.

Best shopify themes

Therefore, we have it organized for you. We have come up with some best practices which you can implement while customizing your Shopify themes. This will keep your things organized and will keep you on track of your work.

1. Adding Structure:

Adding basic structure to your design process may prove to be fruitful in many ways than you can imagine. Structure brings in scalability and allows you to have a consistency to your design. It offers usability which eases the use of the website for customers.  Overall productivity increases with the structure to accommodates growth and change.

Creating structure is not that difficult. Start with the following and every will lead you to build your foundation:

  • Launch a good GitHub workflow
  • Develop design phases for your process
  • Gather tools and tips to save time in your workflow

Constantly iterating your design will make you as efficient and effective as possible and you can use the flowing steps to build scalable and sustainable Shopify Themes.

2. Explore the Design Process:

Before you begin your work, closely study the requirements to be on track and save valuable time. Some of the questions to consider are:

  • Any use of identical elements in the theme: this will save your time and you can use it elsewhere to shorten development work?
  • Are there shared patterns available from a Pattern library to use for the theme?
  • How much time is required to create each element?
  • How will you implement these elements in the theme?

We suggest you separate each element and treat it as a module in your coding process to simplify things from the starting.

3. Prototype, prototype, prototype:

When you prototype, you save resources, time, and engage the client in the feedback loop which can only be beneficial for the whole project.

Some of the known prototyping tools which can help you in this area:

  • Sketch ($99) — It is a professional prototyping tool designed for Mac users. This tool allows you to quickly create wireframes and prototypes.
  • InVision (Prices depend on your plan) — This tool serves three purposes for you. Besides being a prototype, it also acts as a project management suite and a collaboration tool.
  • Marvel (Prices depend on your plan) — Marvel is a browser-based tool and you can start free by creating an account on the site. It easily mock-up prototypes and these can also be shared among colleagues.

4. Build out each module:

Now that you can begin coding, pay attention to the modules and make sure that all your end products:

  • Have cleared the sanity check
  • Is responsive
  • Reviewed thoroughly
  • Is accessible
  • Compatible with all devices and browsers
  • Is production quality fit

You can use these three websites to test these elements:

  • Google Page Feed Insights
  • Org
  • YSlow

5. Review the Design and Test:

Once you finish coding, review your design thoroughly step by step. Include user access to the theme during your review to find bugs and flaws in the theme and its functioning. Deploy at least 5 users to identify the issues in the theme and its related products. Testing your theme will ensure it will work fine at the client’s end.

With all these practices, you can easily customize your Shopify theme to suit your client’s requirements and increase its scalability to a large extent.

At WebBee, these practices are a part of the process and our engineers are geared up to deal with such scenarios. We aim to provide maximum benefit to our clients with as much reduction in cost as possible. We tend to follow the process from start to end to ensure perfect functionality, coding standards, compatibility to accelerate the growth of customer’s business.

Partner with WebBee to get outstanding services for Shopify development and customization. Our designs are creative and provide maximum usability, functionality, and scalability.

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