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Common Shopify UX Mistakes and How to Spot Them in Reports

Updated , first published · 4 min read

Many common Shopify UX mistakes are invisible from your own desktop: search that returns nothing, a buy button hidden on phones, text that is hard to read on a photo, shipping costs that appear only at checkout. Shopify’s own reports show most of them if you know where to look: Searches with no results, Sessions by landing page and the Conversion rate breakdown by device. Below are ten mistakes, each with how to spot it in your store and where to fix it.

Report names and rules come from the Shopify Help Center pages on behavior reports, theme accessibility, storefront search and web performance, read on October 23, 2026.

The ten mistakes

1. Search that finds nothing. How to spot it: Analytics > Reports, category Behavior, report Searches with no results. Every term on that list is a shopper who wanted something you may sell. Fix: add synonyms and product boosts in the free Search & Discovery app, or rename products in the words shoppers use. More in Shopify search.

2. A landing page that leaks. How to spot it: Sessions by landing page shows where visits start. A page with many sessions and few cart additions is your weakest entry point. Fix: make the product, price and buy button visible on the first screen of that page, and check the message matches the ad or link that sends people there.

3. A phone experience worse than desktop. How to spot it: ask Sidekick “Show my conversion rate by device type for the last 30 days”, or compare devices in the Conversion rate breakdown. Fix: test the full path on a real phone; look for buttons covered by chat bubbles, cookie banners or popups.

4. Text you cannot read on images. How to spot it: check your banners and slideshows with a contrast checker. Fix: Shopify’s rule is a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for body and button text and 3:1 for large text (24 px and up), including text over images; some themes let you add a color overlay behind text.

5. Headings in the wrong order. How to spot it: a page where a level 4 heading follows a level 2. Fix: use headings in sequential order without skipping levels, as Shopify’s accessibility guidance asks, so screen readers can follow the page.

6. Too many sections and animations. How to spot it: a slow homepage in Shopify’s Web Performance report or PageSpeed Insights. Fix: Shopify warns that high numbers of sections lower performance and that animations can slow pages. Remove sections nobody uses and compare performance with animations on and off.

7. Surprise costs at checkout. How to spot it: a big drop between “reached checkout” and “completed checkout” in the funnel report. Fix: show shipping costs or the free-shipping threshold on product and cart pages, and link your shipping and refund policies from the footer.

8. A menu that hides the catalog. How to spot it: visitors who land on the homepage and leave, or use search for things that have a collection. Fix: name collections the way customers talk, keep the main menu to your real categories, and put the rest in the footer.

9. Too many choices on one page. How to spot it: product pages with long option lists and many near-identical variants, and a low cart rate. Fix: group variants, show the most popular option first, and use filters on collections. Our guide to decision fatigue goes through each point of choice.

10. Answers missing from the product page. How to spot it: the same question arriving by chat or email again and again (sizing, delivery time, materials). Fix: put the answer on the product page, as a size chart, a delivery line near the price, or a metafield block for materials and care.

A 30-minute UX check

  1. Read the no-results searches for the last 30 days and fix the top five.
  2. Open your top three landing pages from Sessions by landing page on a phone and on a desktop.
  3. On the phone, add a product to the cart and reach checkout; note every moment you had to zoom, scroll back or close something.
  4. Run one banner through a contrast checker.
  5. Read last week’s support messages and list questions a product page should have answered.

Recordings and heatmaps add what reports cannot show, such as where a visitor hesitated; see heatmaps for Shopify. For our own sites, we run an automated check at every screen width from 320 to 1920 pixels after each change, because a layout problem can appear at one width only. The running a store hub has the rest of our store guides.

Frequently asked questions

What makes a Shopify store hard to use? Search that finds nothing, pages that bury the product and price, buttons hidden on phones, hard-to-read text, too many choices, and costs that appear only at checkout. Shopify’s reports show where these happen in your own store.

How do I test my Shopify store’s UX? Combine Shopify reports (no-results searches, sessions by landing page, the conversion funnel by device) with a test on a real phone: add a product, reach checkout, and note every moment of friction. Heatmap and session-recording apps add detail.