If you want to increase conversion rates for your ecommerce store, there’s one thing you should focus on above all else – optimizing your website design. This includes everything from the layout of individual pages and elements to how well search engines can index them. There are many ways you can optimize your site for conversions, but here are some of our favorite tips and tricks that we see every day leading to more sales and more loyal customers.
Optimizing your WooCommerce store will help you convert more visitors into paying customers, and increase the revenue from each customer that you do get. There are three main areas of optimization that we’ll be looking at today: site speed, clear and concise content, and great design elements. Site speed is one of the biggest factors in determining whether or not a customer will convert on your website, so it’s important to ensure that it’s fast! Make sure you have good content with regular updates so that customers can find what they’re looking for easily. And lastly, make sure your design is visually appealing to the eye!
Reduce Image Size
When building your website, it’s important to keep in mind that images are one of the main causes of slow sites. You’ll want to be careful you are not adding any extraneous or unnecessary graphics. When we talk about reducing image size, we are talking about keeping the actual file sizes as small as possible.
However, it is important to keep the image size in mind too. When browsers load an image, they load the full-size image and then resize it according to your design. If you upload an image that is 2000 x 2000 pixels, but are only displaying it as a 400 x 400 image on your webpage, the browser is going to load the full 2000 x 2000 image and the resize it.
If 400 x 400 is all you need, then resize the image using your favorite graphics editor and upload it to your site at that size. It will greatly reduce the file size and decrease your page loading times.
Compressing the images is also a good idea. Compressing your images doesn’t have to be a frustrating and time-consuming process with the right tools. There are many plugins for WordPress that can do it automatically when you upload a file.
You can use a caching plugin like Litespeed Cache or WP Rocket to configure your site for lazy loading. Instead of displaying every image as soon as someone accesses your site, lazy loading tells the website to load each image when they scroll down far enough so that it’s visible on their screen. This tactic prioritizes images at the top of each page by making initial load time substantially shorter and provides better user experience due to reduced scrolling distance in order to view all content on an individual web-page.
Update Your Store Consistently
WooCommerce and WordPress are constantly receiving updates that offer increased stability, speed, & security alongside a variety of new features. Simply updating your store is the easiest way to improve your site’s performance–especially if it has been quite some time since your last update.
Furthermore, some plugins receive ongoing support from their creators which makes them an important part of keeping your website optimized.
Updates are not always predictable. Sometimes, the updates will cause your site to crash. It’s not a bad idea to visit WordPress forums and make sure there aren’t any problems with the new update.
It is not possible to predict how an update will affect your site, so you need to have backups of your website. Best practice is to use a staging area to test new plugin and WordPress updates before updating them on your live site.
Cache Your Product Pages
Certain parts of your website have information that changes how they work. For example, the checkout process may be different depending on which products a user is buying.
On the other hand, other pages have the same content for everyone. Product pages, for example, are the same from one user to the next.
Plugins leverage that distinction by caching static pages. Caching is the process of storing files on your computer so that a web browser can access them quickly. The server sends only static-content pages to your browsers (e.g. product and category pages).
Caching helps you get information faster and with less load on your WordPress / WooCommerce site’s server. It also reduces traffic and limits the number of users hitting your server and database at one time. It is a great way to reduce load times!
Caching won’t improve performance throughout your entire site, but they can make product pages load instantly for returning users.
Upgrade Your Hosting
Hosting is the foundation on which your site is built. Your hosting determines how strongly your site will be affected by certain server issues, and affects the speed at which it loads over various internet connections.
Budget-friendly hosts may not have enough bandwidth to support a WooCommerce website; they’ll get slow when traffic spikes or other sites start monopolizing too many server resources.
A good hosting service will have ways of dealing with spikes in traffic and can easily add more bandwidth when needed. Be sure you research the hosting options available to you so that you end up with a provider that can handle your online store’s steady growth in traffic!
Invest in a Content Delivery Network
Compressing images, updating your store, caching product pages, and investing in better hosting can all help your site load faster. Another option to consider is a Content Delivery Network, or CDN. A CDN is a group of servers that host copies of your site’s content throughout the world in order to distribute them to regional users and reduce the latency caused by the distance between a server and your web visitor.
Using a CDN doesn’t necessarily improve performance all by itself. A CDN is only useful to the extent that you’re already making good use of your server’s resources and caching static pages.
When a user accesses your site, the content delivery network will cache the files. When another user requests those same files, they’ll be served a copy from the CDN’s server instead of your own!
Make Sure Your Web Design is Visually Appealing
These days, websites are more about how they look than just the content. You want to make sure that your website is pleasing for your customers because that will help them trust you. The more trustworthy your customers feel about your store, the better they will perceive it to be.
How does a visually appealing website help you gain trust? Well, for one thing it helps communicate professionalism and competence-which is critical when a customer is handing their credit card information over to a complete stranger! The next time you are looking at your website , ask yourself if you would be comfortable giving the site your personal information.
Site speed is one of the biggest factors in determining whether or not a customer will convert on your website, so it’s important to ensure that your pages are loading fast! Make sure you have good content with regular updates so that customers can find what they’re looking for easily. And lastly, make sure your design is visually appealing to the eye!
Take all of these tips into consideration as they will help you grow your online store in no time!
