With numbers expected to steadily increase in the coming years, and eCommerce currently accounting for around 1 in 4 of all retail sales in the UK, optimising eCommerce web pages has become key for successful online businesses.
An important part of eCommerce page optimisation is ensuring an excellent customer experience. This includes making sure the page loads quickly, that the navigation is intuitive and easy to use, and that all relevant information (such as product descriptions) are clearly displayed. It’s also crucial to consider how customers will interact with your website on different devices – mobile phones, tablets or desktop computers as this can significantly influence their buying decisions and overall satisfaction levels.
In this guide, we’ll be exploring these key strategies, and more, to optimise eCommerce web pages to drive sales and improve the performance of your brand.
Optimising Web Page Speed
One of the most important steps in improving eCommerce page performance is optimising page speed. Pages that take too long to load can lead to high bounce rates. Google found that the chance of a bounce increased by 32% when a page went from one to three seconds to load – meaning that with poor load times, customers are likely to leave before they’ve even had a chance to browse your products or services. It’s essential that you examine how quickly your web pages are loading and identify any areas where improvement could be made. This includes reducing image file sizes, minifying HTML, JavaScript and CSS code, caching frequently accessed content, ensuring browser compatibility and reducing redirects.
Utilise Responsive Design
To compete in today’s competitive online market you need to ensure that your website is optimised for mobile devices. With 52% of total web visits currently being performed on mobile and people using their phones more to buy online, having a responsive design is important for providing a good customer experience across all devices. Responsive design means that the layout of the page will adjust automatically depending on the device being used – so that customers don’t have to scroll sideways or zoom in and out to see content clearly.
Engaging Content & Copy
The content on your eCommerce website should be engaging and relevant to your customers’ needs. Product descriptions need to be both accurate and informative. When users are searching for products or services online, they’re essentially looking for an answer to their question. For example, if you run a gardening equipment eCom site and a user is searching for a wheelbarrow – they’re essentially asking “how do I make gardening easier and more efficient?”. You can answer this query in your wheelbarrow product description, detailing how your product holds a significant load and that it’s easy and smooth to operate.
Metadata
Metadata helps search engines understand the content and topics on your eCommerce website. This includes meta titles and descriptions, which should be optimised to ensure that they include relevant information about each page, as well as being concise and engaging – this will give users an insight into what they can expect from the page when they read it in search results. Meta titles are also one of the easiest and most effective ways to signal to search engines about what your page contains and can help to boost rankings in SERPs.
Checkout Experience
A well-designed checkout page should be easy to navigate, with clear instructions on how to complete the process. It should also provide customers with real-time updates on stock availability and shipping costs. Also, providing payment security symbols can help to reassure shoppers that their data is safe and secure.
Cross-Sell Opportunities
Cross-selling is an effective way to increase sales and improve customer loyalty. This involves suggesting related products or services to customers based on the items they’ve already added to their shopping cart. For example, if a customer adds a laptop to their cart, you can suggest an accessories bundle such as mouse mats and cases that will complement the purchase. This is simultaneously beneficial to your brand and the user as it helps them to find the most suitable products for their needs quickly and easily – as well as helping to improve your bottom line.
Implementing a range of these optimisations is only going to benefit your performance in the long run. Once implemented, you should regularly review tracking metrics to discover where customers are dropping off in your sales funnel – as well as testing different tactics to continue improving. With optimised, customer-centric eCommerce websites becoming ever more essential for success online – it’s important that you stay one step ahead of the competition.
Partnering with digital marketing agencies can help to ensure that your eCommerce website is designed and developed in the most effective way possible. With expertise in areas such as paid advertising, web design, SEO and more – they can help you to create an engaging digital platform – tailored to meet your customers’ needs, so it’s always worth your consideration.
