Focal Shopify Theme Review

Focal is a fairly popular paid theme on the Shopify Theme Store. Focal is a great choice for those looking for a simple and effective Shopify theme.

Price

Focal is listed for sale for $ 320, which can be said to be quite high in the premium theme segment. To be listed on Shopify Theme Store, it has to go through a lot of strict checks, so you can completely trust it. The quality that the theme brings will be completely worth the money you spend.

Theme template

The Focal theme for Shopify comes in four main styles: Carbon, Ivory, Quartz, and Sapphire. Each style has its own unique look and feel, so you can choose the one that best suits your brand.

• Carbon is the most modern theme, with a sleek and modern design that will suit any store. But perhaps it will be most suitable for stores that sell technology products as well as electronic products.

• Ivory is perfect for stores that want to exude a more traditional feel. It’s a style that’s perfect for a business that sells ready-to-wear clothing.

• Quartz is perfect for stores that want to evoke a feeling of the olden days. It comes with a vintage-inspired design that will make your products look like they’ve been around for years and still exude a sense of luxury. expensive accessories.

• Sapphire: Hearing the name of this style, you probably also associate more or less the feeling that the style brings to the user’s eyes, which is the feeling of sparkle and luxury. This would be suitable for businesses that sell gems.

⇨ Depending on the orientation of your store, there are the most suitable theme styles for you to choose from. Focal has done a great job of letting the styles have their own colors and sellers can quickly choose the most suitable style for my store.

Loading page speed

–  According to the experience on the demo site, the speed of the Focal theme is fast, fully loaded and less slow, the pages load smoothly, fully and quickly when going to the next page. This is a major factor affecting SEO rankings if you want your website to rank high.

– Website can be slowed down due to the Shopify app, image size, complex way you edit theme code and many other factors, so with this score Focal theme is speed friendly.

– Measure page speed with the Indexed Page Speed Test tool: 

• Speed Score on the desktop is 94
• Speed Score on mobile is 49

⇨ Focal site performance is average and needs to improve 

– Some stores use Focal theme, you can go into the experience and check the store speed with the tool Pagespeed

• Freedom Pro Store: https://freedompro.eu/
• Hooké Store: https://hooke.ca/
• Kurier Store: https://shopkurier.com/
• HOMÈRE Store: https://www.homere.shop/

Marketing support

SEO

– URL optimization:

• The URL is short, clear but still makes sense, easy to read and easy for the reader to remember (EX:https://themes.shopify.com/themes/Focal/styles/chantilly/preview)

⇨ Clear and reliable when clicking on the link . 

– Title optimization:

• The title is short and summarizes the content of the article.
• Do not abuse keywords, titles: titles are not repeated between pages.

– Optimizing heading 1:

• Every page of Focal demo site has a unique H1.
• H1 tag matches the title of the article.
• H1 tag is short and easy to understand right with the content of the article.

– Optimizing sub-heading (h2,h3,..): 

• Located in the body of the article.
• According to each page of Focal, the layout is clearly divided and the H2, H3 help support the main title of the whole page.
• Short, not too long.

– Optimize meta description: 

• Focal’s meta tag content: short, concise, shows the page content, helps attract customers 

– Optimize images for SEO

• The images on the Focal page all have captions for the images inserted in the page.
• In the articles, there are images for each section such as blog page, product page, etc.

– Optimize internal links:

• Links from pages are related to each other and redirect to the right page.
• Keywords related to the content of the page.

– Optimize external links: 

• As important as internal links, there are links to other pages that help create connections with your store from many different places

– Mobile optimization and fast loading:

• Experience when using the mobile good interface without overlapping challenging to see
• The download speed is fast and relatively stable with few errors

– Social optimization: 

• There are social buttons on the page to help the store easily call for interactions and purchases such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter

– Optimizing readability:

• Line length: paragraphs are broken down and it’s easy for the reader to follow the progress
• Alignment: margin spacing creates separation by section

⇨ SEO of Focal is good and stale, support you a lot in increasing search rankings on Google 

⇨ Focal always pays attention to customer feedback and comments: giving customers trust and interest in them, peace of mind when shopping.

ADS

The interface is easy to see and clear: new users will not be confused by the information. Help attract customers from the moment they enter the homepage, after a period of experience with the website, customers are interested in the content of the page with the product pages.

Message on the same page: easy to see and highlight the store’s programs

⇨ Simple website and highlight products for sale.

⇨ Draw the store’s attention to your customers and capture their interest.

Marketing support

• Customizable popup banners easily: advertise your store’s brand easily by highlighting it and the store’s upcoming programs.
• Newsletter: customers want to receive the latest information from the store and the products they are interested in.

⇨ Relatively full support for marketing plugins but will need to install additional plugins such as chat and call because the theme does not provide them.

What features can you find on Focal Shopify Theme?

– Flexible design, works well on both mobile and desktop

– Pretty good experience on Mobile

– Ajax is applied to the quick view of the cart without the buyer needing to go directly to the page

– Multi-currency: Users can simply manipulate themselves to convert to the price of their local currency. Help sellers receive customers all over the world.

What are people say about the Focal theme?

• The number of positive user reviews reached 96% of the total 240 reviews from sellers who have used the theme. Most of them are highly appreciated in all aspects of the theme such as Design Quality, Code Quality, Support Custom, …
• But besides that, there are still a few negative reviews about when they have problems with the Theme, they cannot contact the Theme developer’s support team.

How is our experience with this theme?

Pros:

– Regular updates help the theme become completer and more upgraded than the previously released versions. The latest version released is version 8.7.7 released 4/2/2022.

– Up to now, it has been 8 months since the theme has not been updated to a new version.

– Changelog is quite detailed, sellers can completely follow to update the theme for their store.

– Easy to customize.

– Support fast, timely customization, and thoroughly solve the given problem.

Cons:

– The price is quite high.

Who should use the Focal theme?

– Because the theme will have a big impact on your store, so you need to choose the theme that best suits your store.

– For those who are just starting out with Shopify or small and medium businesses, I recommend you use the free themes on Shopify Theme Store before deciding to buy this theme for your Store because of the price of the theme. quite tall.

– For large businesses, this is quite possibly the theme you are looking for, it will help you quite well in promoting your store.