Instant gratification. With the invention of the internet, people have been able to get the things they want at a faster pace, particularly when it comes to purchasing items online. It may take some time for customers to receive their packages after ordering products, but they agree to this in exchange for the benefit of being able to purchase them right away. People do not have to shower, change clothes, battle with traffic, and shop in crowded stores now, and they will accept the trade-off of waiting awhile for their items to be delivered. Consumers expect that ecommerce websites will be able to load quickly without any mistakes. They desire locations that quickly grab their attention and keep it. They desire ecommerce websites that are user-friendly, simple to understand, and designed according to their preferences. If your website does not catch the attentions of visitors in three to five seconds (the so-called ‘blink test’), it will fail to appeal to their need for timely gratification and you will likely not make the sale.
How To Tell Where Your Website Needs Improvement
Improving your website is half the battle. Knowing what to improve on is winning the war.
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Run your site through a performance evaluation tool
There are several available performance evaluation tools through which you can run your website, but here are the three we recommend:
- Google PageSpeed Insights is a free web performance tool created by Google to analyze your website using Core Web Vitals benchmarks. This benchmark grades your website on a scale of 1-100 on desktop and mobile. The faster your website, the higher your score.
- GTMetrix is a web performance analytics tool created by GT.net. The tool tests your website using a server in any location and scores your performance in percentages 1-100% and grades A-F.
- Pingdom is also a free web performance tool that offers real user and synthetic monitoring of your website using 70 global polling locations. Pingdom also grades your website on a scale of 1-100 and A-F.
2. Review the recommendations
Once you check your website on any of these tools, you will get your grade and direct suggestions for making your website better. A few of these tips might be relatively straightforward, such as enhancing your hero picture, and some may be more complicated, like embedding your CSS. If any of the proposed solutions are too difficult for you to manage, get help from an expert.
Does Your Ecommerce Site Pass the Blink Test?
1. Pages That Load Quickly
Having an abundance of pages and images on your website will lead to it taking longer to load. Gomez’s research indicates that, on average, 40% of online shoppers will vacate a website within three seconds. Shoppers have a desire for your webpages to be up in no longer than two seconds, which can be quite a challenge considering all the visuals, programming, video files, and other interesting content that’s been loaded on it. Having a slow loading time can have a harmful impact on other aspects of your life too. Matt Cutts, the person in charge of Google’s web spam team, confirmed the study’s findings that website speed and page loading times can have an effect on a website’s place on SERP’s. In the end, Google is striving to give its customers beneficial and fun experiences — and no one is able to appreciate the turning symbol that web developers use to keep us captivated while pages are being opened.
If you host your website on the cloud, the speed at which it loads can depend on the CMS program employed.
2. Attractive Design
Once your website has finished loading, everything about the design must hold the attention of viewers for the coming moments. Having a visually pleasing layout, as well as making sure the text is of high caliber, is critical. Keep your message straightforward and easy to understand–don’t overload shoppers with blocks of text; they won’t take the time to read it all before making a purchase. Ensure that the visuals and content are in harmony, or else it will perplex your purchasers.
You don’t have to limit yourself to plain or straightforward ideas, even though you sometimes have to stay within certain boundaries. If you focus too much on minor details like brief messages and snapshots, you’ll fail to catch the attention of your audience. Your site should stand out from your competitors. The most efficient method of achieving this goal is to utilize the blank space on your homepage to create a tidy display, instead of stuffing it with an abundance of options and pictures. It is often smartest to stick to one or two columns when forming an opinion.
You should always conduct a comparative test between two different versions of a website’s layout and design. Using two or fewer columns for our start page at HubSpot has generally been successful, yet there is a possibility that your web visitors will have a different experience.
3. State Your Unique Value Proposition in Your Headline
Potential purchasers want to get an idea of your website when they first visit. According to Brian Clark, the founder of Copyblogger, if your value proposition is hidden within a large amount of text, only one in five people will take the time to find it. He states that eight out of the ten visitors will take in the headline. It is clear from the facts that creating a headline with essential information is essential.
Rather than something generic like “Welcome to Our Site,” have a headline that communicates how purchasers will gain from the things accessible on your website. Be concise. Be informative. Do not put too much pressure on the customers to find the information they need, or else they will quickly move on.
Under that title, you can explain your value in one short and straightforward sentence. Begin with giving them the data they want and then explain why your goods are unique compared to those from other companies.
4. Use Pertinent Images
If you are an expert when it comes to stock photography, you can guarantee that customers will quickly leave when they visit. Your visuals must be distinctive to your website and back up your communication. Affordable stock photos may be appealing, yet they offer no significance to the people who visit your website. Instead of averting to typical and stereotypical imagery, use images of your products, employees, and devoted clients on your website.
5. Make Navigation Easy
When visitors to your website struggle to figure out how to get back to the home page, they are likely to give up and go somewhere else. Leaving a perplexing website is as simple as pressing one button. Ensure that every link is clearly labeled and simple to navigate.
6. Use Consumer-Focused Content
Along with employing lucid and precise terms to snag your purchasers, you need to talk straight with those shoppers. Utilize language that emphasizes the customer instead of referring to your business, such as substituting phrases with “You” or “Your.” Speak to customers in a respectful manner and keep the terminology easy to comprehend. It is important to emphasize your company’s expertise, but not at the cost of diminishing your customers’ self-worth. Finally, speak with your buyer personas’ voices. Your target audience should see themselves in every word. These are all necessary characteristics to create an effective customer profile: the vocabulary and style of speech should strongly appeal to the group of people that you want to attract and make them customers.
Cool It with the Calls-to-Action
We usually like the CTA, however we don’t want it to obstruct a user’s experience. If your ecommerce site is filled with blinking lights, potential customers will not stay. Do not try to give the customer too many options when first offering them something; instead, pick the most pertinent course of action for them to take next. Think about incorporating dynamic content so that you can tailor the experience to each individual user. This way, you won’t give the buyer so many decisions that they are overwhelmed, or worse, irritate them so much that they never return.
Make the Site Mobile Friendly
A large portion of American adults possess smartphones (45%) and a quarter of them also use tablets. If you don’t optimize your website for mobile and tablet users, you risk losing them entirely. Utilizing responsive design on your site is the most effective approach, although you can also implement certain measures to make your full website more accessible to those making use of mobile devices.
- Make images viewable on mobile devices using HTML5, jQuery, or JPGs
- Concise and readable text is crucial
- Make links clickable with areas large enough for thumbs
- Use a single column for content
- Place your CTA above the fold
- Make sure your forms are simple
Make sure your website is performing at its best so that visitors have an instant impression of it, particularly after you have added new material. You risk neglecting numerous potential customers if you don’t.
Have a look at these other suggestions for improving website speed!
Other Website Optimization Tips To Help Speed Up Your Site
Optimize Your Image Sizes
High-quality pictures look attractive, but they can cause your webpage to run slower due to their large size. It is not a good idea to take away the pictures if your business operates an online store since high-quality pictures contribute to building trust with shoppers on the internet.
The best approach is to optimize the image sizes for responsiveness without losing quality and here’s how:
Reduce image size using compression tools
Compressor.io is a helpful tool for reducing the size of high-quality pictures by up to 81% without compromising their quality. Upload your pictures, and the program will reduce their size in the most efficient manner. Other programs like Kraken, Tiny PNG and JPEG.io can offer up to a 50% reduction in the size of images with no reduction in quality.
Upload your images in WebP format
Using WebP images provides a contemporary approach to optimizing images and makes them quicker to load than other approaches. Google states that WebP images provide better compression options for the web, both with no loss or loss of quality, which makes webpages load faster.
When rated on SSIM, WebP images that are lossless take up 26% less space than PNGs. And WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than JPEGs. For sites that have many excellent photos, changing over to WebP will shave off some milliseconds of your loading time and enhance your website functionality.
You can get the cwebp tool offered by Google that can be used to change your images to WebP format by downloading it on your PC. You can also go to places like Convertio and Ezgif to transform pictures from PNG and JPG to WebP.
Fix Multiple Redirects and Broken Links
Too many redirects can cause more HTTP requests to be made, which prevents the main thread from providing an answer to the user’s inquiry. The primary thread of execution will not be able to process new requests until the pending job has been finished.
Reduce The Number of Plugins
Heroes have super powers; websites have plugins. These plugins provide multiple features and capabilities to the public-facing aspect and the back-end of your website. But like everything, there’s a limit.
The server needs to provide your website with the necessary computing power to function properly. The more extensions you add, the more computing capacity required. When your web host can no longer handle the multiple plugins trying to access the same computing resources, it causes your website to slow down. You will notice the impact on the time it takes for a server to respond, how long it takes a page to load, and the quality of the user experience in general. It is wise to only add plugins that are important to the operation of your website.
Enable GZIP Compression
It’s best to keep your website as small as possible, as the bigger it is, the longer it will take to load. A good guideline to observe is to ensure that your page is not more than 5MB in size. You should employ GZIP to reduce the size of all materials affiliated with your website, such as images, programs, videos, and other elements.
GZIP can be used to make HTTP requests more compact prior to arriving at the server. This leads to a decrease of your data usage and can lower the amount of time your server needs to act by as much as 70%.
Use Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
The gap between your server and the user’s position can often contribute to lackluster performance on a website. Fortunately, content delivery networks provide ways of getting your website to customers more quickly all over the planet.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers spread out over different locations that collaborate in order to deliver online content more quickly. Using Content Delivery Networks, the system stores and provides a copy of your website from various servers located around the globe.
When an individual requires your site, the CDN immediately gives them a version from the closest server. This process does away with delays since there is no need to send a query to the source server.
