Businesses try a lot of different things like offering free shipping, sale, loyalty discounts, and many more things to attract customers. But sometimes, they overlook that the website design can make a huge difference in attracting customers.
Website optimization helps in improving website performance. It includes page responsiveness, page speed, navigation, SEO friendliness, etc. Because if you lack in any of the above factors, you might lose a lot of user traffic.
For Shopify store owners, it becomes easy to optimize the website as it is a flexible platform. All they have to understand is how to do it. This article explains the ways you can use to improve the efficiency of your ecommerce stores.
1. Adding Good-quality Plugins
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To build traffic and increase sales conversion, it is inevitable to optimize website performance regularly. And the best way to optimize the store is by adding plugins. Adding any plugin can slow down your store or complicate the user interface.
High-quality plugins would improve your website’s functionality and benefit your business tremendously. But try avoiding unnecessary plugins with features that would not make much difference to your store. You should also avoid plugins with complex assets, operations, and content strips.
2. Improve Website Speed
Customers are used to fast-loading websites. Customers don’t have patience; while your home page is loading, the customer would just switch to another website. If the pages do not load faster, it can affect the customer experience and conversion rates.
There is research that shows websites taking more than 5 seconds to load, fail to engage visitors, and they might not revisit the website in the future. In Google’s SERP performance, a page load time of 10 seconds is acceptable. But if your website takes more than 10 seconds to load, the visitors would be frustrated, and chances are they would leave the website. The point is that web visitors would not spend excessive time on such slower websites.
3. Mobile Compatibility
Smartphones are the preferred choice over laptops of most of customers. Because it is more convenient to use. Ecommerce owners understood this inclination towards mobile phones and started optimizing their website by making it mobile responsive.
If your website pages are not mobile responsive, if they take longer to load, or the UI gets scattered, then it is high time you optimize your website. Or else your customers would probably start looking for mobile responsive websites. If you have no idea whether your website is mobile-friendly or not, you can also check it on Google Search Console.
4. Image Optimization
Image Optimization can improve your website’s performance to a great extent. All websites use images in one or the other way as image helps in conveying the message more effectively. If you are using the images, selecting the file format is important so that you have high-quality images is important. For a web page to load faster, keeping the file image between 1 to 2 MB is ideal. But high-quality images of any format, PNG, JPEG, or GIF, do not fall in the 1 to 2 MB range.
There are tools available in the market that can help you reduce the size of an image without compromising on image quality. These tools help you reduce the size of images and enhance website performance. It will help improve the speed of the website.
5. SEO Optimization
For any website to rank and appear in search results, it should follow the search engine guidelines to bring more potential customers. And so SEO strategy becomes a crucial part of the success of any website.
You can do some research on websites with more traffic and conversions. Analytical tools kike Google Analytics, Google Search Control, and many others help you give clear insights on bounce rates, behavior reports, and many more.
Optimizing a website with the right SEO keywords can help a website rank on the first pages. Focus on details like headlines, meta tags, URL slugs, etc. Find long and short-tail keywords and frame them in your website content. Additionally, you can also do off-page optimization by doing social media activities, guest blogging, influencer marketing, and many more things to improve your website performance.
6. Checkout Process
Complex checkouts can take away the joy of a seamless customer experience. A huge setback if a visitor enjoyed your website, selected the product, and changed their mind before payments due to complex checkout.
There can be many reasons your customers are abandoning the cart. You have to figure out those reasons and optimize your website accordingly. For instance, to simplify the checkout process, you can introduce single-page checkout to make it easier for buyers. Allow them to checkout as a guest user, rather than making the sign-up process compulsory.
Many plugins can help reduce cart abandonment rates. For example, you can use sticky carts or quick buy buttons on your website to remind users of the products in their cart. You can use sale timers to encourage quick checkout. To optimize the details, you can also edit the product details in bulk with the Shopify bulk editor.
7. Website Audit
If you do not keep an eye on your website’s performance, how would you optimize it? An underperforming website can make visitors feel you are incapable of offering a good user experience.
You can use tools like Lighthouse, Google Page Speed, etc., to audit your website performance. It shows detailed reports on what factors need improvement. They suggest steps for you to adopt to optimize those parts of your websites.
Conclusion
Now that you know how to improve the website, it is time to implement it. Shopify users can easily find high-quality plugins that help them optimize the site. To increase your website speed, you must use image optimizers that compress all the images and increase the website’s speed. All the product details must be optimized with uniformity by using the Shopify bulk editor plugin for bulk edits. You should all use the plugin wisely, so it does not slow down the website. Together, these would help you improve the website’s performance and increase traffic and conversion.
