Even a small lift in your website’s conversion rate can hugely impact your sales revenue. But it can be difficult to know where to begin.
Before diving into the more strategic and iterative process of conversion rate optimisation, there are some top-level things to make sure you’re getting right first. These can all impact your overall conversion rate.
More people are using their mobile devices to buy online than ever before, so making sure your website is optimised for mobile users is very important. If your site is awkward to use on a mobile screen, your potential customers will go elsewhere.
Make sure that your website is easy to view, navigate, and checkout for your mobile users. What works on a desktop, with a mouse and keyboard, might not work on a smaller touch screen. Make sure everything is scroll, swipe, and tap friendly.
A mobile-friendly, fast, and fully responsive website will also help you perform better in organic search. Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning that it generally uses the mobile version of your site and content for indexing and determining rankings. Last year, Core Web Vitals were added to Google’s page experience signals, which look for a good mobile user experience as a ranking factor.
Make sure you answer all of the questions a potential buyer might have about what you are selling. Whether it be dimensions, colour, turnaround time, safety, ingredients, or allergen information. Set clear expectations, and don’t leave your users in doubt. If you don’t provide the information they require, they are far more likely to go to a competitor that does, rather than contacting you to find their answers.
This content doesn’t have to be in huge blocks of text either. Think about how information can best be displayed to make it easy for the user to digest.
Having quality content is a win-win. It will help your potential buyers decide if your product or service is right for them and will help with SEO. Remember to write for your audience, and avoid being overly technical, or overly verbose.
With E-commerce being a competitive space, building trust with potential customers is very important. Visitors to your website want to know you are trustworthy and reliable before completing a transaction with you.
Using social proof can be an excellent way of building trust. Whether through reviews, testimonials, or case studies, real positive feedback from your customers can go a long way towards making potential customers feel secure in spending money with you.
There are a host of plugins, free and premium, which allow you to integrate existing review platforms with your WooCommerce store:
Or you can collect and publish reviews directly through your website, with either a custom-designed review post-type, as in this example from the website we built for gift retailer Don’t Buy Her Flowers:
or with plugins like:
If you go the plugin route, always remember to vet your plugin choices to ensure they are trusted, and regularly maintained. It’s also vital to keep your plugins up-to-date to keep your site safe.
There are more and more ways to pay online, and people like to have some choice. Make sure you offer your customers multiple secure ways to pay.
Thankfully there are a number of great payment gateway plugins available for WordPress & WooCommerce, and custom options can be created.
For example, Morleys sell furniture to schools and other public sector organisations. As well as standard payment options, we created ‘checkout on account’ and ‘proforma invoice’ options. On top of this, we added a VAT slider, so that customers can see prices with or without VAT, depending on the preference of their organisation.
Just remember that security is key, so ensure you use a trusted option, keep it up-to-date, and ensure it is properly integrated with your website.
For user experience, and to improve your chances of ranking well in Google search, it is important that your website loads fast. Slow websites are off-putting for users and they’ll go elsewhere, and Google now includes page speed as an important page experience factor in ranking.
A study by Unbounce in 2019 found that nearly 70% of respondents said that website speeds affect whether they’ll buy from an online store.
There are numerous ways to speed up your website, and it is worth talking to you website support and website development partners about this.
Some initial things to consider are:
These can be a big contributor to slow speeds. Make sure you are uploading images at an appropriate size, and use an image optimisation plugin to compress your images. Here are a few options:
Consider serving your images in next-generation formats like WebP. This format allows developers to compress images more than traditional formats, without impacting their quality.
Quality managed WordPress-optimised hosting can make a big difference to how your site performs. As tempting as bargain hosting packages are, it’s likely they won’t be doing your site any favours. Look into hosting which is appropriate to the size, traffic, and complexity of your online store.
A CDN (content delivery network) can be a great option for improving site speed, particularly if you have customers around the world.
A CDN ensures that your pages load faster for users wherever they are, by loading cached information from the server closest to them, in a network of servers.
We all love a good plugin to make life easier, but try to limit the number you use and remove the ones you aren’t using to help with your site speed.
Is the plugin necessary? Could what it does be achieved in another way? Could the functionality or integration be custom developed?
The power of quality images cannot be underestimated. People tend to buy with their eyes, and quality imagery that provides useful information about your products can go a long way towards making a sale.
The example below from Don’t Buy Her Flowers is high quality, appealing and clearly illustrates what the buyer will receive and how it will be packaged.
A blurry photo, or one that provides no context of size, is either going to deter customers or end up in returns when items arrive and aren’t as expected.
The example below of product images from Vetro Tooling clearly shows the different grades and colours of the discs available, along with a magnification of the surface type.
Think about what would be useful for your customer to see. If it’s an electrical item, perhaps show connectors. If it is a vase, show it next to something for context on size.
Established in 2003, Impact Media is a WordPress Agency. We’re dedicated to UX, web design and development for WordPress & WooCommerce websites.
If you’d like to see some examples of our work, you can take a look at our e-commerce website case studies.
If you’re not sure where to start in making improvements to your online store, consider a WordPress & WooCommerce Health Check audit, or a user experience audit. We can identify key areas for improvement and provide recommendations on what needs to be done.
If you’re thinking about redesigning your WordPress/WooCommerce website or considering re-platforming your e-commerce site to WooCommerce, talk to us today.
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