Did you know that 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad user experience?
If you own an ecommerce store, you may want to improve the user experience of your site so that you’re not losing out on sales. However, you may not know what really matters when it comes to improving user experience.
Here are some ecommerce web development tips that’ll help you provide a user-friendly experience. If you implement these tips, visitors will be amazed at how easy it is to use your website.
Let’s begin!
1. Speed Is Critical
When it comes to user experience, website speed can play a huge role.
After all, if your site loads slowly, users will be frustrated and may decide to spend their money elsewhere.
So, how can you go about improving the speed of your website?
Well, to begin with, it’s a good idea first to determine what’s causing your website to load slowly.
Fortunately, you can figure this out by using the ‘PageSpeed Insights’ tool.
This is a free tool developed by Google that helps website owners learn more about the speed of their website.
All you need to do is give the tool your website URL, and it’ll analyze your site and give you a ‘score’ that can be anywhere from 0 to 100. The tool will also provide you with a list of things you can do to speed up your website.
If you don’t know much about web development, some of these suggestions can be quite complicated, and you might not know how to implement them.
Following this, you might want to think about hiring a freelance web developer. If you want to keep things simple, you may just ask them to get the PageSpeed Insights score to 100.
Once they’ve finished working on your site, you can verify their work by using the PageSpeed Insights tool to check your new score.
2. Don’t Forget About Mobile
A lot of people will access your site using a mobile device, and so you need to think about how you’re going to provide an ‘optimized’ mobile experience.
Generally, there are two ways you can design your site so that it provides a good experience on a mobile device.
The first method is based around giving your website a ‘responsive design.’
This means your website will rearrange itself so that it looks good on different ‘screen sizes.’
This option works well because it’s cheap and requires little effort on your part. If you’re using a WordPress website, all you need to do is make sure your website is using a theme that is ‘responsive,’ and everything is taken care of.
The other option involves creating a specific website for mobile users.
So, if someone visits your site on a mobile device, they’ll automatically be redirected to a specially designed mobile version of your site.
This approach can cost more than using a responsive design, as you need to create an additional website, alongside your normal site.
However, a mobile-only website can often be a lot faster than a responsive website.
This is because the website is created specifically for a mobile device, and so it doesn’t have that many complicated bits of code.
Plus, a mobile-only website can provide a better user experience because it’s designed for mobile users. On the other hand, a responsive site needs to work well on both computers and mobile devices. This can sometimes result in a bad user experience on both platforms.
Whichever option you choose, make sure you regularly visit your site on a mobile device. In doing so, you’ll be able to spot the issues that are causing a bad user experience, thereby giving you the chance to fix them.
3. Monitor User Behavior
Another way you can improve user experience is by monitoring the way people interact with your website.
Luckily, you can do this by using a tool that helps you track user behavior such as ‘clicks’ and ‘scrolling patterns.’ With the help of these tools, you’ll be able to uncover issues that might result in a bad user experience.
For instance, on your product pages, you might provide people with images of your products. However, you may not have a feature that allows people to zoom in on the images, and you might not think that this is a big deal.
Yet when reviewing user experience data, you might notice that a lot of people are clicking on the product images, so that they can get a closer look.
As a result, you now know that people want to get a closer look at the products. You can then add this feature to your site, thereby making things easier for visitors.
4. Work on the Backend of the Site
In some cases, you will need to improve the backend of your website if you want to provide a better user experience.
For instance, if you have a lot of product pages, you’ll need to set things up so that you can easily make uniform changes to all your pages.
If you’re unable to do this, you may end up with conflicting bits of information. This will then confuse visitors, thereby providing a bad user experience.
Fortunately, you can address this issue by using an information management tool such as Alpia.
Such tools provide you with a centralized location for all product data. If you make adjustments within these tools, the changes will transfer to all relevant pages. This then allows you to maintain some consistency, which helps you provide a good user experience.
Will You These Ecommerce Web Development Tips Help You?
If you use these ecommerce web development tips, you should be able to improve the user experience of your website.
When working on the user experience of your site, you’ll likely increase profit levels by a few percentage points. In the short term, this might not sound like a big deal, but over time, even a small 1% increase in profit can result in a lot of money.
It’s because of this that you need to constantly focus on improving the user experience of your website. If you can do this consistently, you should be able to make a lot more money from your ecommerce store, of which you can use to grow the business even more.
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