by actovision | Nov 10, 2021 | Web Development
Ecommerce industry has witnessed a massive boom in the post-pandemic world. Several small businesses are bringing their stores online to boost their sales. In such a scenario, it’s important to pay attention to every small detail as a single mistake can throw you behind the competitors.
In this blog, we will explore some of the common mistakes in eCommerce website development that you can easily avoid. Check these out.
Mistakes to Avoid in Ecommerce Web Development
Incompatibility with Mobile Devices
A study by The Drum finds that mobile devices account for 65% of all eCommerce traffic. This highlights the importance of a responsive web design that is seamlessly accessible on mobile devices.
Website developers always recommend using widely tested themes so as to ensure the responsiveness of a website. You can opt for Google’s mobile-friendly test to find out if your site is optimized for smartphones.
Also, frequently check your website manually. Many often, a shopping cart looks perfect on mobile devices but fails to work when the users place an order.
Complex Navigation
Always abide by navigation best practices as too much uniqueness is not a wise decision here. Here are a few points to remember:
- Anything clickable should be highlighted and large enough so that the users can tap on it using a mobile phone.
- Categories should be easily accessible from the top menu or hamburger menu.
- Allow the users to sort by important features like price, relevance, popularity, etc.
- Keep provision for multiple filters unique to your product inventory.
- Make sure that the users can save their cart or wishlist for a certain period. Usually, people don’t shop for something online in one go (except for essential items like medicines). They will browse multiple sites, compare prices, read reviews, and check out different products before making their mind. Ensure that their saved cart or wishlist is not lost.
- A search function with autocorrect and autocomplete features will instantly increase the users’ convenience.
To ensure streamlined navigation, we recommend you contact a professional website development company. The experts will focus on intuitive navigation and enhance user experience.
SEO Errors
Without proper SEO practices in place, an ecommerce website cannot achieve success in this competitive landscape. Here are a few common issues to look out for and fix:
Duplicate page: Since an eCommerce website has lots of product pages, you need to make sure that a page doesn’t have a duplicate version. This is usually caused by URL variables. You can use a canonical tag (“rel canonical”) to inform the search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using this tag will prevent problems caused by duplicate or identical content appearing on multiple URLs. It will also highlight which version of a URL you want to feature in search results.
Broken links: It’s important to find and fix broken links. A broken link may imply that a webpage is no longer available, the page is moved without a redirect, or the URL structure of a page is changed. It’s important to resolve these with proper tags/redirects so as to increase the users’ convenience. There are two ways to fix the issue: replace the links with live links and remove the links.
Other than these technical SEO issues, you need to invest in comprehensive SEO services that help in promoting your site and drive organic traffic to your site. Since reputation is a crucial factor for eCommerce websites, winning the top rank on the search engine, building brand awareness, and promoting brand credibility play paramount roles in growing a business.
Too Much or Too Less Product Description
You know that product description is important to inform people more about the product and earn their trust. But it’s important to understand that a product description should provide adequate information without making people bored. They may be exhausted while reading a never-ending product description with irrelevant details.
Point out which information are central to your product and feature those. You can include a product video for the people to get a better insight.
No Upsell Opportunities
These days, upselling has proved immense merits in boosting sales. If you want your customers to add more products to their carts and checkout, upselling can be the right strategy.
Major eCommerce platforms like Magento, Shopify, Woo Commerce, etc. offer functionality that can display products related to the individual product page. A feature like “customers who bought this item also bought” can offer amazing opportunities to improve transaction rates and thus enhance average revenue per order.
Failing to Define Unique Selling Proposition
Every business has a USP but many forget to flaunt it on their websites. This is one of the worst mistakes to make. With so many competitors around you, it’s important to underline your distinguishing feature so as to stand out in the market and appeal to your audience. Further, with large marketplaces like Amazon around the corner, you must give a compelling reason for the users to buy from your website.
For instance, do you offer a customization service? Can the users customize the products they are shopping for? Are you offering pan country free shipping? No matter whether you belong to B2B or B2C domain, highlight your USP on the site.
Of course, there are many other aspects that you can optimize on your e-store but these are the starting points that you cannot afford to overlook. We hope you have found the blog useful. Share your thoughts with us.
by actovision | Nov 10, 2021 | Web Development
In today’s competitive landscape, it’s not enough to build a website, but you need to ensure that it is performing at its best. Consider your website to be an employer that works 24/7. Naturally, you have to prep it up to excellently perform at all times.
Poorly crafted or optimized websites are not user friendly, exhibit slow loading time, incompatible with cross devices & browsers, and so on. As a result, the site’s bounce rate increases and conversion rate decreases. Further, all these inspire a negative impression of your brand. Take a look at the following sections to find out how to enhance your website’s performance. And if you find these too much technical, consider engaging professional website design services instead of trying amateur hands. Anyway, without further ado, let’s dive in.
Key Steps to Improve Your Website Performance
Reduce HTTP Requests
HTTP requests are used by web browsers to fetch different elements of a page such as images, scripts, and stylesheets. Each request has some overhead while establishing a connection between the web server and the browser.
Further, browsers usually have a limited number of parallel network requests. Therefore, if you have many requests piled up, some of them may get blocked.
The first step is to remove unnecessary requests. Consider the minimum number of HTTP requests required for rendering a website. Then, load only the essential external resources.
You should also eliminate any irrelevant images, stylesheets, JavaScript files, fonts, etc. If you use a CMS like WordPress, remove unnecessary plugins that load additional files on each page.
After trimming everything irrelevant, it’s time to optimize the rest of the elements. We will get to this later in the blog.
Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Content Delivery Networks use geographically distributed servers. That means the server closest to the site visitors will serve static files like CSS, fonts, images, and JavaScript.
Generally, while serving static files from your server, the loading time increases as the users are physically from the server. On using CDN, the loading time for images will remain the same regardless of wherever the user is connecting.
It supercharges your site’s performance. Other than offering a fast user experience, it also helps in anticipating site crashes in case of a traffic flood.
This blog will offer more insights into how to enhance website loading speed.
Optimize Images
These days, the use of graphics has heavily increased as they convey ample information in an engaging manner.
For instance, websites sometimes use images of 2x or 3x resolution so that these can be exhibited well on high-density retina screen displays. However, if the users don’t use a HiDPI display (High Dots Per Inch display – the one that consists of more pixels per square inch than a regular display), then you are wasting your bandwidth and increasing the loading time. Many visitors browse websites using mobile data or from remote locations with poor internet connectivity. You can imagine how your website will perform!
Therefore, compress your images without affecting their quality. Further, use the right file type while optimizing image size. For example, use JPEG for images with lots of colours and PNG for simple graphics.
Leverage Preloading Techniques
There are various preloading and prefetching techniques that you may use to inform your browser about which resource is required for rendering the page before the browser really needs these resources.
Here are a few performance optimization techniques practised by the experts at any reputed website development company:
DNS Prefetching: It is the process of resolving a website’s IP address even before the visitor clicks on the link. It seeks to solve latency issues related to DNS resolution such as the time it takes for your site’s domain name to be resolved to an IP address. It can significantly improve your site’s performance because when the browser needs to make a request for a resource, the DNS lookup for the specific domain has already taken place.
TCP Preconnect: It helps the browser to set up an early connection before an HTTP request gets sent to the server. This includes TCP handshakes, TLS negotiation, and DNS lookups. This eliminates roundtrip latency and saves time.
Prerendering: This is the process of preloading all elements on a page in preparation for a web crawler to find them. The prerender will send a cached version of the site to feature all images, JavaScripts etc. that are rendered statically. Naturally, this speeds up the site.
Prefetching: It allows websites to maximize performance and minimize waiting time by preloading resources that users will need later before they make a request. The browser will request the resources beforehand and store them in the cache for future reference.
Check out this blog on how to optimize page speed to meet Google’s latest update.
Reduce Time to First Byte
TTFB or Time to First Byte is the time it takes for the browser to receive the first byte of data from a server. Though it is a server-side concern, it also plays a crucial role in the overall site performance.
When it comes to TTFB, the main element under your control is the server processing time. Here are a few tips recommended by Google to enhance TTFB:
- Optimize the server’s application logic to render pages faster.
- Optimize how your server queries databases or migrate a quicker database system.
- Upgrade your server hardware to have more CPU capability or memory.
Select the Right Hosting Plan
There are three options for hosting service:
Shared: Here you share the resources of the server with other customers. If someone’s website receives a rush of traffic, the resources will be limited for supporting your site and the site may experience downtime.
VPS: Here, your website is sharing the server with other sites but each site lives in a secure container with resources like memory, CPU cores, disk space etc.
Dedicated: This is the most expensive of the lot. Here, the entire server will power your website. Needless to say that this is the most secure of them all.
These days, serverless computing or Cloud computing has given a break from all these. Here, the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand and takes care of the servers. The best part of it is that it offers excellent scalability.
Minimize and Combine CSS, HTML, and JavaScript Files
Try to load CSS and JavaScript in a single request for each. You can accomplish it by minifying and combining distinct CSS and JS files into a single bundle.
Browsers can receive a limited parallel network request. Therefore, if your site needs 4 requests to load, it will be faster than loading 25 requests. Developers use various tools to combine multiple files. That way, they can leverage the benefit of a single bundle while deploying.
While minifying or optimizing the size of CSS and JavaScript files, remove and shorten symbols in the source code. First, minify CSS and JavaScript files and then combine them into single bundles.
These are some of the proven ways of boosting your website performance. Try these and you can see the difference these make!
