According to a recent study by Google, if a web page takes more than three seconds to load, 53% of mobile visitors leave it right away. And the reason behind it is straightforward.
Modern users are time savvy and due to the plethora of options available, they do not think twice before abandoning a website. The performance of a website depends on several things but speed is one of the most important factors. It plays a vital role in deciding the type of customer experience your website provides, which is another component responsible for the performance.
Similarly, there are some others like your website’s designs, SEO, and checkout processes that are together responsible for the performance. In this article, we will discuss all of them along with some tips and tricks that will help you improve the performance of your online store.
So, let's get started.
1. Keep Your Eyes and Ears Open
To solve the problem, you first need to find it. Your online store optimization techniques should be directly linked to your analysis and reporting tools. Campaign performance, traffic report generator, conversion analyzer, every one of these tools is your ears and eyes.
Thus, you must manage and use these tools well to gather data about your consumers, their behavior, and the sub-processes integrated with your website. Set up Google analytics and find out where the problem is. If you do not find this information sufficient, get some third-party tools and find factors like where are your customers stuck in the conversion process or what is driving them to your website. Once you get to know all these things, you can replicate effective campaigns and remove the hurdles easily.
Your eCommerce website optimization techniques should be data-informed. You must not throw out or invest your time in implementing some random strategies against the wall hoping some of them will stick. Use tools and integrations to find out what will make them stick and do more of that.
2. Pay Special Heeds to Website Speed
Even though speed is a factor that affects the performance of a website the most, several retailers find it hard to optimize. And even a seconds delay can impact the bottom line of an eCommerce business.
However, thankfully there are several ways to improve the speed of an online store, including:
Use a CDN: If your business is spread around the world, consider using a content delivery network. It caches the website pages on servers situated in several parts of the world which reduces load time and increases speed.
Change hosting: Making a choice on an eCommerce website hosting provider is one of the most critical decisions you will have to make since it directly impacts the speed of your website. If your online store experiences traffic spikes often, it would be a good idea to not use a shared server. Or, ask your service provider to scale up or down the server depending on the traffic on the website.
3. Reduce Cart Abandonment
After speed, this is the second biggest problem that most retailers face. Even if you are fulfilling your revenue targets, you will want to earn more because who does not? That's why it is a crucial optimization technique. Here is what you can do to improve it:
Eliminate surprises: When shoppers are ready to check out, they do not like surprises. In fact, more than 60% of consumers abandon carts due to extra shipping or other added charges. Thus, eliminate them and display everything on the product page clearly.
Offer guest checkouts: Do not compel your customers to fill long forms before the checkout. Modern-day consumers are tech-savvy and they do not like providing their personal information for you to use as data. So, do not force them and add a guest checkout option.
Use Emails: Even if a customer abandons a cart due to whatsoever reason, you can always use emails to drive him back. But, for this, you will have to create a killer email marketing strategy.
4. Keep Your eCommerce Development Platform Updated
This is crucial due to many reasons. First, it will improve the speed and functionality of your online store. And secondly, it will save you from several security threats.
For example, Magento releases new security patches and optimization every week. Thus, it is crucial for every business to update them to save their platform from data breaches and other threats. However, a few retailers do not provide attention to upgradation and they end up compromising their business reputation and revenues. Some of the eCommerce websites are still operating on Magento 1 whose support was ended by Magento in June 2020.
5. Use SEO Best Practices
Nothing pays off more than boosting the organic traffic on your website. While other marketing techniques provide you short-term results, SEO helps you in the long run and it never hurts to show up at the top of SERPs. It increases your visibility, traffic, builds brand authority, and provides you with more potential customers.
The three components that you need to fix for search engine optimization are keywords, metadata, and on-page SEO. You need to optimize factors like code cleanliness, HTML tagging, meta tags optimization, and others to get things done.
6. Iterate, Test, and Optimize
There is always some scope for improvement in the customer experience of an eCommerce website. But, improving the experience requires regular iterations, testing, analysis, and re-optimization.
This process should again be data-informed. You can do several things to provide customers a better experience depending on what they are expecting the most. For example, if most of your customers are stuck at the payment step, add additional payment methods. Find out if there are any errors or roadblocks in your checkout process.
Or, add personalization to help your users spend more time on your website. You may consider integrating product recommendation engines or a video that shows how your products are beneficial for the users.
In Conclusion
Starting and launching your eCommerce business is like hitting the starting line of the race. You will need to optimize your business processes and website at every stage to stay competitive and win. So, set the goals high, use the above-mentioned eCommerce website optimization strategies, and get the show running.
