In the ever-competitive world of e-commerce, the success of your online store hinges on more than just great products—your website design plays a critical role in converting visitors into loyal customers. Whether you’re running a store on Progressive Web Apps (PWA), Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento), Shopify, or BigCommerce, implementing the right design principles can make a significant difference in your site’s performance, user experience, and overall business success.
At 247 Commerce, we specialise in helping businesses optimise their e-commerce websites, integrating the best design practices to enhance functionality, user engagement, and ultimately, sales. In this blog, we’ll take a deep dive into the top 10 e-commerce website design best practices, focusing on PWA, Adobe Commerce, Shopify, and BigCommerce platforms, and how to make the most out of these technologies to create a seamless and compelling online shopping experience.
1. Optimise for Mobile-First Design
With over half of global web traffic coming from mobile devices, mobile-first design is essential for all e-commerce websites. Whether you’re running a PWA, Shopify, BigCommerce, or Adobe Commerce store, designing for mobile ensures that customers can easily browse, shop, and checkout from their smartphones.
- PWA: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are designed to provide a mobile-first experience, offering the best of both native mobile apps and web-based shopping. With PWAs, e-commerce businesses can deliver lightning-fast, app-like experiences directly in the mobile browser, enhancing performance and reliability.
- Shopify: Shopify’s mobile-friendly themes ensure that your online store looks great on any device. Shopify’s themes are responsive, meaning they automatically adjust to fit mobile, tablet, and desktop screens. Additionally, Shopify’s mobile app allows store owners to manage and optimise their store on the go.
- BigCommerce: BigCommerce offers a wide range of mobile-optimised templates that adapt to any screen size, allowing your customers to have a seamless experience on mobile devices. You can also integrate mobile payment solutions like Apple Pay and Google Pay to make checkout even easier.
- Adobe Commerce: With Adobe Commerce, responsive design is built into the platform, but you can further customise it to create an engaging mobile shopping experience. Adobe Commerce also supports mobile-optimised checkout, making it easier for customers to complete their purchases on any device.
2. Implement Fast Loading Times
Site speed is one of the most important factors affecting user experience and SEO rankings. Slow-loading websites frustrate users, leading to higher bounce rates and lower conversions.
- PWA: PWAs are known for their ability to load instantly, even on slower networks, thanks to service workers and caching strategies. This makes them an excellent choice for delivering fast, reliable, and engaging shopping experiences, regardless of the user’s internet speed.
- Shopify: Shopify takes care of hosting and performance, ensuring that your site loads quickly, even with high traffic. However, customising images and simplifying the design can further boost speed.
- BigCommerce: BigCommerce provides built-in features like CDN integration and image compression to improve load times. Additionally, BigCommerce automatically optimises your site’s speed for mobile users.
- Adobe Commerce: Adobe Commerce allows for advanced performance optimisation by enabling caching mechanisms, database indexing, and content delivery networks (CDN). Customisable settings let you fine-tune the platform for maximum performance.
3. Simplify Navigation and User Interface (UI)
A cluttered or complicated website design can overwhelm visitors, causing them to abandon their carts before checkout. A clean and intuitive navigation system is essential for improving user experience and driving conversions.
- PWA: PWAs are built to be highly intuitive, offering easy navigation across product categories, search filters, and the checkout process. They can also store the user’s preferences for easy access on return visits.
- Shopify: Shopify offers drag-and-drop themes that make creating an easy-to-navigate website simple. Themes often include built-in navigation menus, product filtering, and search capabilities to enhance the user interface.
- BigCommerce: BigCommerce allows you to easily create clear, streamlined navigation systems with options like mega menus, custom category filters, and search bars. These features ensure that customers can quickly find the products they’re looking for.
- Adobe Commerce: Adobe Commerce provides deep customisation options for creating intuitive and efficient navigation menus, product categories, and search functionalities. With Adobe’s robust search engine and customisable themes, you can tailor the user interface to your business’s specific needs.
4. Seamless Checkout Process
A long, complicated checkout process is one of the most common reasons for abandoned carts. Simplifying the checkout process can drastically reduce friction and increase conversions.
- PWA: PWAs are inherently designed for fast, seamless checkouts. PWAs can store payment details and shipping information securely on the device, enabling a one-click checkout experience for returning customers.
- Shopify: Shopify offers a one-page checkout that is optimised for mobile users. Shopify’s Shopify Payments allows for faster and more secure payments without the need for third-party integrations, reducing friction during the checkout process.
- BigCommerce: BigCommerce’s one-page checkout, Express Checkout, and integration with multiple payment gateways streamline the checkout process for customers. It also supports payment methods like Apple Pay and PayPal to provide customers with a range of secure options.
- Adobe Commerce: Adobe Commerce offers a highly flexible checkout process with the ability to customise fields and payment methods based on your needs. You can also integrate multiple payment providers, such as PayPal, Stripe, and Amazon Pay, to offer customers a variety of secure checkout options.
5. Personalised User Experience
Personalisation is key to building long-term customer loyalty and increasing average order value. Personalised recommendations and targeted promotions can drive higher conversions and improve customer satisfaction.
- PWA: PWAs excel at delivering personalised experiences by leveraging local storage and data caching to offer custom recommendations, targeted promotions, and special offers based on the customer’s browsing and purchase history.
- Shopify: Shopify’s product recommendation engine uses customer data to display personalised products based on browsing and purchasing behaviour. You can also integrate third-party apps for more advanced personalisation.
- BigCommerce: BigCommerce offers built-in personalisation tools, including dynamic product recommendations, tailored promotions, and geo-targeted content based on customer preferences.
- Adobe Commerce: Adobe Commerce is known for its advanced personalisation capabilities, leveraging AI to provide custom product recommendations, pricing models, and content based on customer behaviour and demographics.
6. Integrate Social Media and User-Generated Content (UGC)
Social proof is a powerful tool for building trust and encouraging conversions. Featuring customer reviews, social media posts, and user-generated content can help foster a sense of community and encourage shoppers to buy.
- PWA: PWAs integrate well with social media platforms, allowing for easy sharing of products and user-generated content. You can also integrate social logins for a smoother checkout process.
- Shopify: Shopify supports integration with social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook to showcase user-generated content and promote social commerce.
- BigCommerce: BigCommerce allows you to incorporate social proof through features like customer reviews, ratings, and social media feeds, enhancing your website’s credibility.
- Adobe Commerce: Adobe Commerce can integrate with social proof tools and apps to feature customer reviews and ratings, which helps increase trust and conversion rates.
7. Clear and Consistent Branding
Your website’s design should reflect your brand identity consistently across all pages. This includes using your logo, colour scheme, typography, and overall aesthetic to communicate your brand’s values and style.
- PWA: PWAs allow for complete customisation of design and branding, ensuring a consistent look and feel across your app and mobile website.
- Shopify: Shopify’s themes are highly customisable, allowing you to integrate your brand’s unique style and logo into every page of your website, from the homepage to the checkout.
- BigCommerce: BigCommerce provides a wide range of pre-built themes that can be customised to match your brand’s colours, fonts, and images, creating a consistent and professional look across the site.
- Adobe Commerce: Adobe Commerce allows for extensive customisation of design, making it easy to integrate your branding elements. With custom themes and advanced design tools, you can create a truly unique and branded experience.
8. Security and Trust Signals
Security is a top concern for online shoppers. Ensure that your website is equipped with trust signals like SSL certificates, secure payment gateways, and clear return policies to enhance consumer confidence.
- PWA: PWAs support the use of HTTPS and SSL certificates for secure data transmission, ensuring a safe experience for your customers.
- Shopify: Shopify offers SSL encryption and PCI DSS compliance, ensuring that all transactions are secure. Shopify also displays trust badges to reassure customers.
- BigCommerce: BigCommerce includes SSL certificates and integrates with leading payment providers to ensure secure transactions. The platform also offers fraud protection tools to safeguard against unauthorized purchases.
- Adobe Commerce: Adobe Commerce provides SSL certificates, two-factor authentication, and advanced fraud protection tools to secure transactions and protect customer data.
9. Engaging Product Pages
Your product pages are the heart of your e-commerce website. Well-designed, informative product pages with high-quality images, detailed descriptions, and clear calls to action can drive conversions.
- PWA: PWAs allow for smooth, immersive product pages with fast load times and interactive features like 360-degree product views or augmented reality (AR) for an engaging shopping experience.
- Shopify: Shopify themes include visually appealing product pages with features like product zoom, carousel galleries, and customisable product descriptions.
- BigCommerce: BigCommerce provides features like product filtering, variant options, and zoomable images, ensuring your customers can make informed purchasing decisions.
- Adobe Commerce: Adobe Commerce excels in product customisation and multi-product variation support, allowing you to offer highly detailed and engaging product pages.
10. SEO and Marketing Optimisation
Optimising your website for search engines is essential for attracting organic traffic. Ensure that your design incorporates SEO best practices, including fast load times, mobile-friendliness, meta tags, and keyword-rich content.
- PWA: PWAs are SEO-friendly by design, offering improved performance and fast indexing for search engines.
- Shopify: Shopify has built-in SEO tools like auto-generated sitemaps and optimised URLs, allowing you to optimise your website for search engines with minimal effort.
- BigCommerce: BigCommerce’s platform is designed with SEO in mind, offering features like customisable URLs, meta tags, and automatic product schema markup.
Adobe Commerce: Adobe Commerce offers advanced SEO tools, allowing you to create highly optimised pages and easily integrate with third-party SEO plugins for enhanced rankings.
