How to Optimize Your E-Commerce Website to Increase Sales
Is Your E-Commerce Store Successful?
The key to success for all e-commerce stores is increasing conversions. Essentially, more visitors equals more money for your business. You’re not making much money if you aren’t getting visitors to your site.
Global e-commerce sales are expected to total $5.5 trillion worldwide in 2022. Furthermore, this number is expected to continue growing over the next few years, proving that ecommerce is becoming an increasingly lucrative option for businesses. As a result, optimizing your e-commerce website, increasing those conversations, and making more of a profit for your business are becoming more critical.
You may have driven traffic through targeted ads, newsletters, or social media posts. But chances are, you still may be seeing low conversion rates. According to IRP Commerce, the average conversion rate in all segments of all e-commerce markets increased by 19.63% from 1.61% to 1.92% in July 2022 compared to July 2021.
So how do you break the 3% conversion rate? By diving into your analytics and optimizing your CRO, or your “conversion rate optimization.” In this article, we’ll dive deeper into CRO and the steps you can take to drive those conversions into leads.
What is “conversion rate optimization?”
CRO, or “conversion rate optimization,” is the process of optimizing your eCommerce website to convert more leads or performing the desired action on your website, such as adding a product to a cart or filling out a form.
It’s common practice to focus on conversion percentages, averages, and benchmarks when analyzing your CRO, but it’s more effective to look at it from a holistic perspective. Instead, focus on the process that drives, stops, and persuades your users. This understanding will help deliver the best user experience possible and improve your website conversion rate.
Below are some strategies you can implement to optimize your e-commerce website and increase conversions.
6 Strategies to Optimize Your E-Commerce Website
Improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you want to ensure that customers find your website, it’s essential to have a strong SEO marketing strategy. You can make sure customers find your websites on search engines by:
- Using specific keywords on your page titles, headlines, or meta descriptions
- Internal linking to other pages on your website/blog
- Using long-tail keywords related to your products/services
By leveraging your SEO, your website’s search engine visibility will increase, driving traffic and, in turn, the potential conversions made.
Optimize Page Speed
According to 2022 web design statistics 2022, 47 percent of online users expect a webpage to load fully within two seconds.
The faster your website loads, the less likely your customer will abandon it and decide not to make a purchase. When running an online business, it can be easy to forget the simple logistics such as website speed. Still, low website speed can frustrate potential customers and become a detriment to your conversions.
To ensure your website is up to speed, follow these three steps:
1 – Analyze your render start time
Analyzing your render start time is a great way to see how long it takes for your content to load. On average, a render start time of <1 second will have a mobile conversion rate of 10.50%, and sites with great RST will boost customer engagement rates by up to 50%!
2 – Check your speed with PageSpeed
PageSpeed makes it easy to check your website’s speed in one click. Just enter your website URL, giving you several metrics for your website’s speed performance.
3 – Install a WordPress caching plugin
Using a WordPress caching plugin can make your website up to 5x faster. In addition, caching plugins will store static versions of your website, allowing WordPress to skip running heavier PHP scripts every time your site loads to a customer.
Update Website Content Regularly
You may need to consider updating your website if you catch yourself using old blog posts, outdated landing pages, or irrelevant photos. It would help if you attracted new visitors while maintaining your current ones. Therefore, it’s essential to update critical aspects of your website regularly. One way you can do this is by curating new blog content.
Curating new blog content can help you drive conversions in multiple ways:
- It makes it easier for customers who have never heard of your company before to get a sense of what you service or offer simply by reading past blog posts
- Increases traffic to your website by creating text-based CTAs
- Helps to establish your business as a thought leader within the eCommerce industry
Don’t let your visitors get lost! Making your website easier to navigate is a great way to create a robust user experience for prospective customers and improve your conversion rate.
It’s essential to ensure customers have an easy way of finding things on your website, whether it be locating your contact information, filling out forms, or finding certain products/services. Robust site navigation makes it easy for customers to see what they need quickly and conveniently.
If you want to improve your site’s navigation, keep it consistent. Your navigation should stay the same from page to page. Additionally, make sure to organize categories.
Subcategories should be visually different even if the links are different. Lastly, use accurate navigation titles. Visitors should know what they’ll find on a page before clicking on it. Misleading titles can frustrate customers and lose them within the conversion process!
Optimize the Checkout Process
Optimizing your checkout process is critical. In 2022, statistics show that approximately 71.4% of online shopping carts are abandoned (across the Americas) before purchase due to extra costs, complicated checkouts, and account creation requirements. These rates are even higher among mobile devices.
To avoid losing your customer, make the checkout process quick and easy. Strategies include offering a guest checkout option, clear and concise shipping information, or simple navigation links to the checkout page. Some other ways you can streamline your checkout process are:
- Saving your customer’s billing and shipping information
- Offering a shipping calculator to ensure transparent shipping costs
- Providing an order receipt after purchase
The easier you make the checkout process for your customer, the more likely they will convert.
Offer Live Chat Support
Software such as Tidio, LiveChat, or Hubspot can provide a seamless user experience by addressing customer concerns and questions quickly and efficiently. The last thing a potential customer wants to deal with is being put on hold in customer support calls.
Having live chat supports prevents that frustration and enables a faster conversion process. In addition, a helpful chat session can convince a reluctant customer to purchase your product (and potentially repurchase in the future!)
Optimizing Your E-Commerce Website
Optimizing your e-commerce website is crucial in increasing conversions and driving the growth of your business. Implementing the six strategies outlined are only some of the ways to optimize your site–don’t be afraid to try out and test new strategies.
Once you better understand what is and what’s not working, you’ll be able to optimize and drive those conversions. We are here to help!
Do You Need to Optimize Your E-Commerce Website?
Are you interested in selling your products online but unsure how to build an e-commerce site? Our team of professional e-commerce designers will be happy to help you with this. But, first, look at our portfolio and read our case studies.
Then, if you believe we are a good fit for your e-commerce web design needs, let’s talk! We offer a full range of consulting and design solutions for businesses and product brands.
And if you are still unsure how to optimize your e-commerce website and increase conversions, let’s talk! We will listen to you, answer your questions, and determine the best e-commerce solutions for your company or product brand!
Are You Selling Online?
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By PixoLabo
Not Your Average WordPress Web Design Agency
@pixolabo
