If you sell products and/or services, you definitely need to have a strong online presence. However, be prepared as the ecommerce space is quite competitive. Not only is there competition with local and regional brands, but you also face off with international giants such as Amazon. This exactly why you must focus on every single detail of your ecommerce website for it to succeed.
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Speed Matters. Here’s why
Performance is important for any website, especially ecommerce ones. A significant aspect of performance is speed. Your website speed directly affects your ranking on search engines and your customers’ shopping experience.
A Slow website will result in fewer page views, a decrease in customer satisfaction, and fewer conversions.
Setting up an ecommerce website that’s optimised for speed is not a one-off thing. The more your site grows, so will the need to keep it updated and highly functional. Sometimes you make changes you think are great but they end up affecting your performance. Should that happen, ensure you immediately address it to get your site back on track.
This article will help you with a guide on how to maintain a fast ecommerce that coverts easily. You’ll benefit from these tips, whether you own a brick and mortar retailer and have decided to finally expand into an online business, strictly Internet-based, or something in between. So keep reading even if you are just creating a new ecommerce website or want to optimise the performance of an already existing one.
The tips will also help you to generate more leads while leading to additional sale conversion to increase your bottom line.
Let’s go.
1. Create a Strong Foundation
Just like building a house, the foundation is everything. From the outset, make sure when you setup ecommerce site, you are hosting them with a high-performance ecommerce website company like Hosting.co.uk.
Create a strong foundation with a Fast & Reliable Ecommerce Webhosting company
The speed or how fast your page loads is one of the most important elements of running a successful ecommerce website. Each page needs to load fast in order to yield high conversions.
Another reason you need to use a trusted ecommerce website is for fewer glitches. That’s because the only thing worse than a slow loading site is one that crashes, glitches, has lots of error reports
2. Design a clutter-free site
Ecommerce websites should be clean and not elaborate and cluttered. Most times simple designs turnover a higher conversion rate. Check out your own homepage right now as a visitor. What’s the first thing your prospective customers see? Do you like what you see?
Make sure that the reasons you quit poorly designed sites and refuse to do business there, doesn’t happen on your site.
There should be a clear point of reference on your homepage. Not only should visitor instantly see your products and/or services, but should also be drawn straight to a Call to Action (CTA) button to add items to cart.
Too much clutter will confuse potential buyers who’ll find it difficult to identify your CTA. Your goal is to make as many sales as possible. So make it easy for customers to do so.
3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDN refers to a group of servers distributed all around the world. Why do you need them? Well, since they are located all over the globe there’s always a server closer to the person engaging your site. This significantly improves speed making local user experiences faster.
Think about it this way, your website is hosted in the UK and you have clients in Australia, the time it would take for the page to be responsive would be longer. Just by seconds, but a second of delay online can cost you a sale. Now if you use DNS you could have a server right there in Australia, which will allow your site to load faster.
4. Compress images and Reduce Page Size to improve speed
Your webpages include several elements all elements such as — images, JavaScript, CSS. When images and objects on your site are too big, they take a longer time to load. So the smaller the page size, the better for your customers and your bottom line. Avoid embedding huge images or objects on a page. Keep load times at the forefront of your mind when designing pages for your ecommerce site.
Try to keep page load times to less than 3 seconds. There are ecommerce sites that require richer graphics in order to generate revenue. If that’s the case with you, finding the right balance between potentially losing shoppers because of slow load times and gaining customers because of richer graphics.
5. Simplify your Menu Options
Menus are awesome at keeping your site organised. It makes it easier for clients to navigate their way on your online storefront. But, don’t get carried away and overcomplicate things. Menus are great but too many categories is a recipe for confusion, making it even harder for customers to find what they are looking for.
Your menu should use broad terms to categorize your products and/or services. For example, if your ecommerce brand sells baby clothes such as onesies, shirts, blouses and vests.
Instead of creating four different menu options for each, you can group them into a single category called: “tops.”
6. Add a Search Bar
Add a search bar, which will add to the high functionality and simplicity of your ecommerce site.
Give customers the chance to search for exactly what they want. That way they won’t have to scrolls through thousands of option before finding what they like. Actually, most customers will not. A search bar fixes this problem. Ease of use boosts conversion. It’s a win!
7. Simply your Checkout Process
Individuals and companies that setup ecommerce websites all have one main goal in mine –sell products or services. But, some sites drop the ball at the very end. How do they do this? By overcomplicating their checkout process.
When a visitor decides to make a purchase he/she just wants to simply make two clink and be done and it is your job to make it that simple. Well, if you don’t you may lose a sale. After all, each additional step customers have to take during the checkout process will only increase the chances of them just abandoning the transaction.
Your mission is to get only necessary information from the buyer. This includes their billing information and shipping address. That’s it and they are done checking out and you’ve successfully made a sale. Congrats!
8. Don’t Force Shoppers to Create a Profile
As mentioned above, you want buyers to checkout in the shortest possible time. So there’s no need to pressure them into creating a profile before being able to. Allow persons to check out as guests. That said, encourage them to sign up so they can benefit for special sales and coupons.
Conclusion
The success of your ecommerce site depends on you. Running a successful ecommerce starts with a reliable ecommerce webhosting company. Follow the guidelines mentioned above and closely monitor your website’s speed and make the necessary changes.
