Improve your e-commerce website in 2024 (part 1)
Happy New Year and meilleurs voeux !
Here is the part 1 of a checklist to improve your e-commerce website in 2024, starting with these steps:
Responsive e-commerce
Immersive e-commerce
Website loading speed
1. Responsive e-commerce
When around 70% of your e-commerce traffic comes from mobile devices, it is no surprise that it has become imperative for e-commerce platforms to be responsive across various screen sizes and devices.
From improved search engine results to a consistent brand image, and as said brilliantly by a generative AI tool:
Responsive e-commerce ensures that users can seamlessly navigate and interact with an online store regardless of the device they are using. This leads to an enhanced user experience, reducing bounce rates and increasing conversions.
When setting up whichever new content or funcitionality on your e-commerce website, always test it out on both desktop and mobile screens before publishing it or hitting send on a related newsletter/SEA/paid social campaign.
Tip: Test out a new page (preferably in Incognito mode) or functionality and use the right-click and Inspect function on your Google Chrome browser to view your content on different screen sizes.
It’s not always 100% accurate but it’s always a good tool if you don’t have different screen sizes on hand.
Surprisingly, it’s also a practical benchmarking tool!
On a Google Chrome browser, right click and select Inspect
In the upper left corner, select the screen size from the dropdown menu. Ignore the complicated code on the right unless you’re absolutely interested in coding.
Having a responsive e-commerce website or platform allows, among others, for a seamless brand experience across all devices. Talking about brand experience in e-commerce leads me to my second point:
2. Immersive e-commerce
The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual (ifvp.org).
In this post, we are not going to discuss virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), or the possibility of visualizing furniture in your own home, even though this would make for another compelling post.
Instead, setting up an immersive e-commerce website begins, in my humble opinion, with full-width banners that run immersive images and/ or videos. The videos don’t have to be long clips from a campaign that cost 200 k. Sometimes, a "loopable” 10 to 15 second video or a wide immersive image is enough to get the momentum going.
Here are some examples:
Trudon desktop version
Trudon mobile version
Typology desktop version
Typology mobile version
“Just because” around 70% of your users come from mobile devices should not mean you should ignore your website’s desktop experience. On the contrary, desktop sessions make up around 30% (give or take), however the percentage of purchases coming from desktop sessions are often much higher than 30%.
30% of transactions coming from desktop sessions should definitely not be neglected - like a twisted version of the Pareto principle or 80-20 rule ;)
Tip: When creating or commissioning content, especially video, brief your agency on having content that can work on both landscape and vertical format. This can be done by centering the main “subject” of the video.
You can always crop a landscape video to a vertical format if you have enough subject material, the reverse option is, in my opinion, more complicated.
Here’s an example below:
When setting up an immersive website, it is also important to keep the impatience of an average user in mind, which leads me to my next point:
3. Website loading speed
Old but gold, your website loading speed can (make or absolutely) break your e-commerce game.
Most modern website backoffice solutions offer fast charging intuitive drag and drop solutions. However, it becomes a little more complex with backoffices such as WooCommerce that include buildable and customizable modules.
The more you add custom plugins and functionalities, the more taxing it can become on your website loading speed, which in addition can have users leaving as quick as they arrived (not to mention your skyrocketing bounce rate).
Ideally, in a perfect world, we (e-commerce people) should all strive for a website that aligns responsive, immersive and fast charging content. However, when in lack of resources (often budget and/ or time), difficult choices must be made.
When in doubt:
Simple is better
Less custom functions for faster functionality
Still image over video (I know, it hurts me too, but sometimes tough decisions must be made)
Tip: Discuss with your IT team/ specialist/ consultant about different solutions to optimize website speed. One of them could be hosting images on an external server, creating different layouts for deskop and mobile pages (lighter and smaller videos on the mobile format and larger, heavier videos on desktop format), reviewing your hosting services and packages, among other solutions…
Bonus tip: Tools such as pingdom or Page Speed Insights allow you to test your website speed across different countries and devices, with recommendations.
There are so many more hacks and important subjects…
… that are coming up in part 2!
What are your thoughts on this part 1 and on improving your e-commerce website in 2024?