One of the most important things a business owner can do for their online store is to make sure it is well-designed and fully optimized for your customers, ensuring a smooth browsing and shopping experience. An easy-to-use shop will naturally lead to more sales, as even the smallest difficulty in the customer journey might throw them off the end goal of making a purchase. If you’re looking for web design inspiration, here’s a list of 100 beautifully designed ecommerce sites to check out.
Of course, even if you know what you want to achieve, setting out to design your own ecommerce site can be intimidating. Fortunately for owners who may also be wearing the hat of web designer for their store, there are many tools available that can help you optimize your site, such as web apps, computer programs, and browser extensions.
As Google Chrome is currently the world’s most popular web browser, web designers often use it to develop sites, and almost all websites are optimized for use on Chrome. This article is focused on the vast array of Google Chrome extensions that can help make web designing easier. Here are our top five choices.
What is a Google Chrome Extension?
Extensions are helpful and convenient programs and tools that can be installed on Google Chrome to serve a number of different purposes, from improving developers' efficiency or your browsing experience to simply changing your browser's color and appearance. They’re easy to download—simply head over to the Chrome Web Store and install what you need.
Using extensions is straightforward, which is why they are extremely popular with web designers. These chrome extensions for designers are a must-have if you want to start designing like a pro.
ColorZilla
Key Features:
- Multiplatform - Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X
- RGB, HSV, and HTML color support
- Palette Viewer with seven pre-installed palettes
- Allows you to pick colors from Flash objects or any zoom level
- GIMP compatible
Make your color-picking and color tasks more straightforward with this handy extension. ColorZilla is a Chrome developer extension that allows you to select the exact color from any visual element you see on your browser, and then use it in another program, such as Adobe Photoshop.
This extension includes an eyedrop color selector, a color history tool, a CSS gradient analyzer, and a page analyzer that identifies colors on a web page. Using this extension allows you to pick and customize color themes more efficiently for better and more attractive web page designs. A good site design can help evoke the right mood for your online store and make it more appealing to potential customers, which can influence the perception of your business and product and bring in more sales.
Spectrum
Key Features:
- Different color impairment settings
Design must also accommodate differently-abled users, such as those with Color Vision Deficiency or color blindness. Customers with either of these conditions will likely perceive the products you sell differently, particularly if its appearance is a vital feature.
Spectrum helps you test the visuals and design of your site, showing you how people with different color impairments will see the colors on it. There are many options imitating many color deficiencies, allowing you and/or your team to adjust your site’s user experience accordingly. The more people are able to fully understand what you’re selling, the more they’ll be able to buy your products.
WhatFont
Key Features:
- Simple user interface
- Recognition of font family, size, color, and weight.
- Support for Typekit and Google Font API
WhatFont is a Chrome extension perfect for developers who want to identify fonts used on websites. This tool is easy to use and efficient, and it can identify individual fonts on a page in a matter of seconds. Whenever you browse other web pages and spot a beautiful font, you will no longer have to search for it since this tool will identify it for you. This extension also detects the services used for the fonts, such as Typekit or Google Font API.
YSlow
Key Features:
- Suggestions for page performance improvement
- Displays page statistics
Nobody wants a slow-loading page, especially customers. Luckily, YSlow is here to help. YSlow is a Chrome plugin for improving web page performance and providing page speed ratings. It grades a web page using an established or a user-defined ruleset. It also offers performance-improvement suggestions, displays the page's components, and gives performance analysis tools.
Using this extension is easy, just click on it and run a web page test. After completing its run, it will display on the screen below the grade of the web page’s performance and recommendations.
Window Resizer
Key Features:
- Layout testing on different browser resolutions
- Setting window's width, height, and position
- Customizable global key shortcuts Import and export settings to different computers
- Customizable resolutions
It’s important to optimize your store for the platform your customer is using. Customers increasingly browse through online shops using their mobile phones. Did you know that 79% of mobile phone users have made a purchase online using their devices? A customer browsing through their mobile phone will quickly leave a store if the design is not optimized for mobile viewing.
To keep this from happening, you will want to test the resolution of your store on any platform and to do this, you will need a window resizer. The Window Resizer extension is extremely useful for analyzing different layouts for different browser and platform resolutions. Using this tool, you will see what your store looks like, enabling you to identify design flaws and fix them accordingly.
Frequently Asked Questions about Chrome extensions
Are Google Chrome extensions free?
Are Chrome extensions Shopify-friendly?
Is it safe to use extensions?
Start designing like a Pro
Designing for your store can be challenging, especially if you are new to web design. However, thanks to Google Chrome's extensions, you will have access to tools to make this task easier and more convenient. Your store is the first thing your customers will see, and a beautifully designed store will make visitors more likely to stay on your site. Taking extra care to ensure that everything is in working order will result in a better customer experience and higher visitor conversion.