Start Following Shopify E-Commerce Web Development Best Practices

E-commerce services offered by Shopify make lives easier for the owners and managers of online stores. It gives websites an excellent look and feel via customization using JavaScript and HTML. However, there are a few store owners that have to come up with complicated logic and integrations in their stores to scale and satisfy the needs of their customers. Experts who worked on various stores of different kinds noticed a few improvements you can easily adopt to increase the maintainability and scalability of a Shopify e-commerce web development project. If you continue reading, you will learn about a few of these patterns and improvements.

1. Scoping the global variables: At times, developers need to pass values rendered by the Shopify backend into your theme logic. As you’ll know those values at runtime, an excellent way of hooking them to your code is by defining a variable within the global scope in your template file. Of course, there’s a manageable way of maintaining these variables. You can keep them inside a common object in the global window. You can also name it as your “store” that will help you find the location of these variables quickly. This one is the first among several Shopify e-commerce web development best practices you should employ.

1. Create a bundler: Do you have a significant problem to deal with? Just remember that you can always divide and conquer. To do it, you may need a simple way to concentrate your code into a straightforward theme.js file that you’ll include in your application. There are several options for it. For those who just want to concatenate sources, a “gulp” task should be enough. Others using ES6 modules and features should consider using the “Babel” tool. Apart from that, “webpack” is equally beneficial and deserves attention.

1. Organizing assets: Shopify even allows you to save the assets of your application in the assets directory with no subdirectories as stated in the documentation of the organization. However, you can keep your project perfectly organized. For that, you may add a directory somewhere else. In doing so, you should be able to organize your content much more effectively. You can also make use of separate subdirectories, including images, styles, videos, and SVG based on the asset types used by your project.

1. Code modularizing: If your project starts growing larger, it probably means your store is growing too. There’s nothing to fret over regarding this matter. You should be happy knowing that your business is growing. However, your code may become all the more difficult to maintain. You should split your code into multiple source files. After that, you can create your directory structure for organizing your scripts better than before.

Don’t forget to test

Finally, you should remember to utilize test-driven development tactics. It’s what the best providers of Shopify web development services do. You have to write the tests first, write the code satisfying them, and use TDD to improve software design, quality, robustness, documentation, and ease of maintenance. You may also add more tests to your codebase incrementally. Start by focusing on testing pure functions. After that, examine the UI components, mock services, and everything else you need for happy coverage.