Shopify is well-established as the leading ecommerce platform, with over 2 million active daily users and merchants in more than 175 countries. Since its founding in 2006, it has contributed $319 billion in global economic activity. By 2021, it enjoyed a 29% share of the ecommerce market, leaving its main competitors such as Wix, WooCommerce and Squarespace far behind. Two-thirds of online retailers using Shopify are based in the USA, while Europe accounts for another 17% of the global market.
These figures should be sufficient to convince you that Shopify is the way forward. If so, the first decision you need to make if you’re setting up an ecommerce business is which theme to select. Shopify’s own theme store offers over 100 free and premium ecommerce website templates, professionally designed and optimized for a huge variety of industry sectors.
However, Shopify also gives you access to thousands of alternatives, created and submitted by third-party designers, some free and others paid for. They have all been tested by Shopify and verified to work efficiently on the platform. While that’s a persuasive starting point, you’ll still have to assess any theme against your ecommerce tech stack, the digital tools you need to trade efficiently. With that many choices, it might seem impossible to select the right one for your business, so we thought we’d provide some guidance.
Our RankHigherTheme collection has been designed to provide all the functionality and flexibility required for ecommerce businesses in every conceivable retail sector. Among the nine themes in the collection, you’ll find the best built-in features, including nearly 100 SEO and conversion boosting elements which will help you achieve high search rankings, drive traffic to your store and increase sales. They enable you to scale organically and quickly, making them ideal for businesses with ambitious growth plans.
SEO Features
Without strong SEO, your ecommerce store will be virtually invisible to your target audience. RankHigherTheme provides several essential features to attract the attention of the search engine crawlers and ensure not only that your store is indexed but that it appears above your competitors in search engine results pages (SERPs).
More than 50% of all internet browsing is conducted on mobile devices. RankHigherTheme is an algorithm-aligned platform (AAP) which uses coding to deliver perfectly adapted performance in every search, whether conducted on a desktop, a smartphone or a tablet. While this gives automatic optimization, our responsive tech also allows you to adjust the user experience for all environments.
Page loading speeds have been proven to have a profound effect on customer behaviors. The average time for a visitor to abandon a website can be measured in seconds. We have used CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript files to make sure that our themes, which were always the fastest available, are now even faster to load.
We’ve found preset options to be immensely helpful for business users who want to set up their stores quickly and with minimal input. RankHigherTheme gives you a choice of several presets designed for every one of Shopify’s industry categories. They give you all the tools, filters and menu options you’ll need. Simply add your own images and you’re ready to go live.
Our product filter solution offers you 8 main filter options and limitless sub-filters. They have been canonicalized so they do not conflict with each other, thereby eliminating the risk of page, keyword, content and metadata duplications. There is no danger of your organic SEO performance being impeded.
Theme Settings
RankHigherTheme enables extensive opportunities for customization. Every template can be adapted to reflect your brand identity using over 100 font types with customizable H1-H6 tags and the use of up to 3 different fonts on one site. You can also select your site’s colors, all created to make your images load almost instantaneously. Custom CSS is easy to add for other forms of customization and the choice of page widths is flexible enough to present any look you prefer, modern or classic.
Social media icons are built-in for you to add your links or remove any platforms you don’t use. Shopify blocks can be inserted wherever you need them and you can incorporate third-party apps using the simple customizer tool without having to make any adjustments to the theme’s code. Just as coding-free is the process of adding metafields to enhance the user interface on product pages.
Multi-currency payments are standard across all templates; integrated email and newsletter functions are provided by Mailchimp and Klaviyo; a free app is available with built-in icons to make it easy for customers to create their own product wishlists, thereby increasing potential conversions.
Headers
Headers are a vital part of on-page SEO strategy. The search engines focus on these to crawl your webpages and decide how to rank them. They also help users to read your content and navigate your site. RankHigherTheme has one of the most versatile header functions of any theme, providing three top header sections, unlimited layouts and mobile responsiveness.
Our headers give you the flexibility to foreground your brand, promote your social media channels and tailor your strapline to add time-sensitive messages which can highlight special offers, limited editions and any services that will make your customers more likely to engage and buy.
Menus can be customized and positioned for the best UX. Three search formats are available, with the option to use predictive text search for faster customer access to the products they want.
Homepages
It’s often assumed that even the best templates limit the way your live site can look. While that may be true in some cases, RankHigherTheme stands out by giving you the facility to create a genuinely unique homepage. With customizable fonts, banner grid blocks and call-to-action buttons, the possible permutations are virtually limitless.
Videos and sliders have become standard features of modern ecommerce websites. RankHigherTheme has made these simple to add, adapt, update and remove. We also give you the option to choose an entirely different banner for the mobile version of your store. In addition, you can add responsive videos to almost any page.
Popups, especially on the homepage, can be as irritating to visitors as they are useful to businesses in encouraging customers to sign up to mailing lists. We’ve all had the experience of visiting a site and starting to read the content only to have the entire screen obscured by a distracting advert or promotional announcement. RankHigherTheme popups can be customized so they don’t detract from the UX but can still have the intended effect. Integrated with Klaviyo
or Mailchimp, they can help you build customer engagement and loyalty without diverting users from the purpose of their visit.
You’ll find a versatile selection of grid layouts for promoting selected products from any of your collections, as well as an unlimited number of blog posts which you can design and present with the look that suits your preference. To make the most of the visual potential of social media, a dynamic Instagram feed creates a constant, integrated flow of images from your Insta account to your site.
Collections
One of the fundamental, universal elements of the Shopify platform is the organization of products into collections. For retailers offering hundreds or even thousands of items, it is the most efficient way of categorizing them in order for customers to find what they’re looking for. It also gives the opportunity for upselling, by displaying associated products that might be of interest.
RankHigherTheme is packed with features to optimize the effectiveness of your collection pages. Indexable content appeals to the search engine crawlers, which benefits your SERPs rankings. It includes a customizable breadcrumb section for easier navigation and link distribution plus non-conflicting product filters, including A-Z by name and low to high by price options.
Sale slashes allow you to direct users to promotions and discounted deals; sidebars can be located to the left and right or hidden if you prefer; color swatch filters can present products in different colorways; optional stock availability information and size guides are easy to add; multiple images can be loaded into the image scroller for easy reference. RankHigherTheme gives more functionality to Shopify’s collection feature than any other template.
Product Pages
Drilling down through the collections to the product pages will reveal many more customizable features to improve the customer experience. Integrated product reviews, USP banners, accordion tabs and size guides all help visitors to make informed choices and increase the likelihood of conversions. Image galleries, single product pages and related product links further enhance the customer journey from engagement to purchase.
Checkouts
Carrying visitors through your product range to the checkout and beyond is like walking a narrow, winding path. There are many points at which they could simply step off. Even with a full shopping cart, nothing is certain until the purchase is made. According to a study from the Baynard Institute, 69.57% of ecommerce shopping carts on desktops are abandoned. On mobile devices, it’s even higher – above 80%. That’s a serious level of lost sales. The majority of abandonments happen on websites selling clothing and accessories, but since they account for the majority of ecommerce stores, this isn’t surprising. However, abandonment is a challenge for every ecommerce sector.
The reasons for this phenomenon are varied. The most common one is the level of extra costs added at the checkout, chiefly the price of delivery. The second is the requirement to sign up for an account rather than shop as a guest, and the third is simply the time it takes to complete the purchase.
RankHigherTheme has been designed to address these problems. The checkout process is much faster, enabling you to manage thousands of transactions in a minute, and you can add extensions to integrate all kinds of extra features. For US customers, you can offer payment in interest-free instalments and our unique drop-out mini-cart allows your customers to edit, add and remove items from wherever they happen to be on your site. We can’t do anything about the issue of extra costs, but with the increased business you can generate by using one of our ecommerce templates, you might find your budget can run to free delivery.
Blogs
We’ve transformed the way you can present blogs with customizable layouts for individual blogs and indexes. You can also use integrated social sharing icons which encourage visitors to share content via your store with social media channels, further raising the online profile of your brand.
Final Thoughts
To the question, ‘which Shopify themes have the best built-in features?’ we have to admit we can’t claim to offer a definitive answer. After all, with thousands of themes on offer, it’s impossible to examine all of them in detail. What we can say is that from years of experience, we’ve been able to identify the key requirements which are not fulfilled by most other templates. RankHigherTheme has been created with these shortcomings in mind and we have filled it with all the built-in features you could possibly need. Not only that, but we keep the situation under review in order to make upgrades and innovations as soon as they become necessary and feasible.
We can state very confidently that when you choose RankHigherTheme, you’ll gain access to the broadest range of SEO tools, conversion boosting features and user-friendly functionality of any Shopify theme on the market.