Best practices for building Shopify apps

To optimize your app development experience, Shopify has established a set of best practices that you can refer to when developing your app.

Consider the following best practices to keep your merchants' stores fast, accessible, responsive, and easy to use.

• Performance: Performance is key to the success of the merchants that you support and to the experiences of their customers. Learn how to optimize and test your app for performance.
• Accessibility: Learn how to increase the accessibility of your app to create an inclusive experience for merchants and customers.
• Internationalization: Shopify’s merchants are from all over the world and speak many different languages. Learn how to translate your app and make your app useful to more merchants.
• Mobile first: With the large majority of online store traffic happening on mobile, designing for mobile devices must be at the forefront throughout the app build process.
• Embedding: Embedding your app in the Shopify admin makes your app feel familiar, gives you access to Shopify UI elements, and lets merchants use your app easily on mobile devices. Learn how to optimize the design of your embedded app to reduce context switching and surface key app functionality.

For practical guidance on how to design UI for the Shopify admin, refer to Shopify's App Design Guidelines