11 Ways You Can Optimize Your ECommerce Store
Setting up your E-commerce store is all about setting your online presence in a way that not only helps you keep up the game with your competitors but also makes your customers happy each time they visit your E-store. And if we talk about current times then a website that is not optimized will never bring you any good. Optimizing your E-store is not a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing process and you’ll have to keep a check on your website’s performance from time to time and make the necessary enhancements.
So here are the 11 things that can be done for your eCommerce store’s optimization. Buckle up and read along!
1. Speed up your page load time
In this fast-paced world where each of us demands everything to be done in the shortest possible time and with high accuracy, who would even like to visit a website that takes ages to load? The time your web page takes to fully download matters a lot and every single second matters here because you lose a bunch of customers with every extra second that your website takes to load.
Keeping that in mind, the average page load speed time is 5.3 seconds! Any longer than that and you’ll see people abandoning your website and most likely they would not want to ever visit back.
Certain things that potentially slow down your page speed include:
- The overall size of your website & the hosting plan.
- Usage of the third-party plugins or making a shoddy choice for plugins.
- And the theme you are using.
The first step to catch on to why your web page speed is not up to the mark is to identify the underlying causes. While there are a lot of the tools that you can use to scrutinize the page speed, I would keep Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix on top!
2. Optimized & responsive images
Pictures are the essence of an E-commerce store. And imagine the users opening your store and waiting for several seconds before they actually get to see the product images? For sure such an experience would increase the return rate on your E-store and visitors would just not want to try it out ever again. Images make up to 64% of the website’s weight and thus optimizing them should be on the top of your priority list.
Not only unoptimized images slow down your website but they would cause some grave page load issues. Optimized images are the ones that are compressed, properly resized, responsive, and have proper titles and alt tags which ultimately benefits you in the on-page SEO as well.
The best ways in which you can optimize your images are:
- By resizing the images to the correct and suitable dimensions.
- By compressing all of your images from the start.
- By caching.
- By using image sprites wherever possible.
Other than the above-mentioned points I would love to mention some tools and plugins that come in handy when for image compression and optimization. So here are some of the best tools & plugins that you should bookmark for your next project:
- TinyPNG
- Imagify
- Smush
- ShortPixe
3. Be responsive & flexible with your design
Having a mobile-friendly E-store is really the standard now. Whether it’s about getting a higher rank in Google search results or it’s about you wanting to build your online presence like the moon and the stars… A highly responsive and mobile-friendly website is the answer!
About 72% of the audience we get is via smartphones and people will judge your E-store based on the first impression they get when they open it in their phones. So it is necessary to have your site designed flexibly with high responsiveness of all the web page elements including menu, logo, product images footer, etc.
4. Flaunt the upsells and cross-sells
Upselling and Cross-selling is the knack of coaxing purchase of any product along with the original product that your customer added in the cart. Which benefits you with increased revenue in the most convenient manner. Upsells are like telling the customer to buy batteries with a lifetime of 2 years along with the watch they initially added to the cart. Now, who would want to ignore that offer? Or let’s talk about Cross-sells… where you show the customer a product that compliments the product they added in cart. For instance, an organic shampoo that they might be interested in along with the purchase of organic oil.
Having said that, it is very important to be smart and precise with your upselling and cross-selling strategies. Some of the points that you need to keep in mind when setting up your upsell and cross-sell game are:
- Always be candid with your product suggestions
- Be mindful of the time and situation i.e. don’t suggest buying a sweater with a shirt when winters have passed.
- Always make the reviews up and front for your customer to gain their trust in your products
- Every now and then send your customers a complimentary gift when they are going one step further in their purchase.
5. Reducing HTTPS header requests
Every time someone visits any page on your website what do you think happens? Let me tell you… Their browser simply sends in a request to your website to get all the stuff that is on your webpage including text, images, videos, CSS files, JS files, HTML files, in short, each and every single file. Now imagine how many elements are being used on your web page? And then how many pages does your E-store consist of? And for every single file and HTTPS request is made. The more HTTPS requests are there the more your website speed goes down and down and down….
Now let’s talk about how and what can you do to reduce these HTTPS header requests.
First thing first, you need to identify which files are causing this issue and you do so not by guessing or wasting your time in xyz test and search but by using some of the best tools out there. To mention a few, Go to:
After having a good look at the elements and files that are causing this issue you can now pick them one at a time and resolve them. Some of the things that you can do to reduce these requests to a great number are:
- Identify all the unnecessary files, videos, and images and put them in the trash!
- Enable lazy loading
- Use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache
- By reducing the redirects
- While it is said that combining your CSS and JS files or minifying them would reduce the HTTPS requests, I would suggest being careful with both! Because the majority of the time minifying your CSS and especially your JS files would break your site!
- And last but not the least, Compress your files by using a plugin like Smush
6. Go 360!
We’ve always heard that seeing is believing and when it comes to online shopping, seeing is all that matters to the buyers. Even if you add a crisp clear high-resolution image of your product, that would gain the trust of your customer as much as a 360-degree product view would do. Having a 360-degree product view not only engages the viewer and improves their shopping experience, but it will also make all the visual information clear to them. And thus there will be a lesser return rate on your store.
7. Don’t forget to add a smart search option
Use a simple, well-designed, and smart search option for your E-store. Because there are tons of products on your website and having a search option to look for an item by just typing in some words would make the life of your customers easy and they would smoothly sail in your E-store.
8. Honesty is the best policy!
If you don’t want cart abandonment or visitors leaving your E-store or them getting annoyed, always be candid with all of your prices, shipping rates, out of stock products and delivery time. Imagine a visitor getting attracted to a silk cloak and clicking on it only to find it is now out of stock? Now that’s a real turn off! So a good idea is to take advantage of and utilize stock management and keep nothing hidden from the buyer.
9. Candid return policies
Make sure you have a well designed and well-written page for all your policies especially the return and refund policies. This would ensure none of your customers or you face an irksome and disappointing situation. It’s always a good idea to have a link for your policy page in the footer, your contact page and in the FAQ’s section as well to make sure none of the visitors misses it.
10. Be minimal and precise with the categories
Your E-store might have loads and loads of categories but if you put them all in your navigation bar or even display them all on your front page, that would do just two things: Mess up the look and feel and overwhelm the one who’s looking at them. So it’s always a good idea to organize your categories in a precise, smart, and meaningful way. Displaying your categories in Mega Menu is one good way while another thing that you can do is to divide your categories into featured and subcategories and show all of your subcategories.
11. Live chats and contact page
Sometimes FAQs don’t solve all of the customer’s queries so having a contact page on your E-store plays an important role in customer interaction and making it easy for the customers to send in their queries and inquire about the product they like. Having said that, adding a live chat feature is like a cherry on top. Live chats play an important role in E-stores because a visitor doesn’t have to wait for hours or maybe even days sometimes to get the answer to that query. Some of the plugins that you can use to add a live chat feature on your website with just a few clicks are:
Conclusion
Optimizing your E-store is the need of the time and the best way to ensure that you get the most out of it without losing your online presence and without having to deal with irksome situations. The points I just shared should be applied from the start of your project and not after you’re done with its development. So go ahead and start optimizing your Ecommerce sites! If you’d like to share your experience or got suggestions then do let me know in the comments down below!