02 Apr
Mobile is the future and optimizing your ecommerce site for mobile is necessary to enhance the user’s experience. Optimization is continually evolving, even when you think you’ve done everything you can, there may be a few little tricks that you’ve missed along the way, or that you’ve let become outdated.
So, let’s take a little time and look at the best practices for optimizing your mobile website, tactics you should avoid, and consumer behaviors to factor in.
Why optimizing is important?
If you’ve ever accessed a website on a mobile device, you know it can be frustrating. Tiny buttons and links, endless scrolling, and unclear form fields create hassles that often result in abandonment.
People are busy, stressed out, and impatient. They won’t wait for a slow page to load or spend hours trying to figure out how to add a product to their carts. Nowadays, there are a large number of people using mobile devices to purchase online.
Make sure your mobile website version loads faster than 3 seconds. According to Google study 53% of mobile website visitors will leave a page if it does not load within 3 seconds.
Tips for optimizing your ecommerce site
Here is why optimizing your store is necessary.
- Slow-loading websites
- Safety concerns
- Pop-ups or overlays getting in the way
- Lengthy forms that need to be filled out
- Having to create an account before purchase
- No digital wallet options
The good news is that most of the reasons that put people off their purchase are easy to fix. Here are a few suggestions to optimize your e-commerce site for mobile devices.
1. Big buttons
Remember, most people use their thumbs to scroll through their phone. So, the first thing to do is ensure that any buttons are bigger. This will stop shoppers from hitting the wrong thing, ending up in the wrong place and giving up in frustration.
2. Call-to-Action
A call-to-action is essential and there should be a very clear one through every stage of the process. Whether it’s “buy now,” “check out now” or something similar, your customer should not be confused about how to progress through your site.
3. Never use Flash
Flash elements slow down your website and rarely render well in mobile devices. Neither Android nor iPhone operating systems support Flash, so if your website relies on it, people won’t be able to interact with your business online.
4. Identify non-mobile friendly features
You might have elements on your website that won’t convert well to mobile devices. Take sidebars, for example. A typical sidebar appears on either the left or right of the page. Some are static, while others move down as you scroll. Either way, they widen the page. On a mobile device, a sidebar can make the body text unreadable again, without pinching the screen.
5. Compress your images
Large image files slow down page speed and make your site “heavier.” Compressing your images with a plugin can help avoid these problems. If you’re using a separate URL for your mobile users, consider uploading different, smaller images. That way, graphics don’t overwhelm the screen or cause loading delays.
Product photos are an excellent example. You want a large enough image to allow consumers to view it clearly, but small enough to have a negligible impact on page load speed. Instead of resizing images via CSS, which is what responsive design does, you can upload smaller images that won’t weigh down your site for mobile users.
6. Good content
If the imagery and overall appearance of your mobile e-commerce site don’t look professional, consumers will suspect you’re running a scam and won’t trust you. Stepping up your game will not only change how other people see you and improve trust levels, it’s also good from an SEO perspective as Google ranks search results based on original, engaging content and a low bounce rate.
It’s worth remembering that attention spans have shortened and people prefer small, easily digestible pages, so every word needs to count and make an impact. Your content needs to always direct toward your call-to-action and your images should not blur or pixelate when zoomed in or on mobile.
7. Improve the registration process
By the time people get to the checkout they’re ready to buy, but a lengthy registration process could (and does) put them off. One way to get around this is to create a guest checkout so they don’t have to input as many details and can still purchase from you without too much hassle. Then, once the order has gone through, offer the option to create an account.
8. Make it secure
It’s important to have an SSL certificate (a digital ID card that verifies a site as authentic) for a number of reasons, but a big one is that it helps reassure customers that their credit card details and any other personal information will be safe on your site.
9. Quick checkout
Offering consumers the choice to pay for their purchase with a digital wallet is another way to speed up the checkout process. Look at Amazon’s 1-Click: it lets customers buy things with just one click, without having to enter and re-enter billing, payment or shipping information.
Digital wallets such as Apple Pay, Visa Checkout and Paypal One-Touch hold your customer’s preferred credit cards securely, can be used quickly and safely whenever they want to pay for something and can triple conversion rates.
How to make your online store mobile-friendly
In addition to the tips mentioned above, here are a few other tips for that can help in making your site more mobile-friendly:
- Mobile-First Design: Websites that launched before such increase in mobile devices had no choice but to start with the desktop version of its site and then develop its mobile experience around that. But considering that the majority of internet traffic is now mobile, online stores that are just starting out would be wise to design the mobile version of its site first and make its desktop version less of a priority.
- Visual Hierarchy: Speaking of priorities, one of the most important things to consider with mobile-first design is that you don’t have much room to work with. You’re not going to be able to feature many different types of content above the fold like you can on the desktop version of your site. Whatever is most important to your business at the moment (limited-time offer, new product, etc.) should be featured at the top of the page where users are most likely to see it.
- Every Page Counts: Think about the customer journey. Most people don’t start at your homepage and then go from there. Rather, the majority of your visitors will land directly on a product page from clicking on a search result, social media post or advertisement. And if they’re sent from a site that’s been optimized for mobile to one that hasn’t been, that experience will be so jarring that they’ll likely just back out.
- Prioritize Content When Setting Your Breakpoints: In mobile web design, a breakpoint is where a change in browser size triggers a corresponding design change, such as the switch from three to four columns in a product listings grid. While the sizes of common mobile devices should be considered when you’re setting your breakpoints, there are so many different types and sizes of devices out there (with more surely to come in the future), you’ll be better off considering the content on your site first.
- Be Bold: The limited space available on mobile devices also isn’t kind to subtleties. Detail that looks impressive on a desktop may very well make your site difficult to read and use on a mobile device. Instead, use bold colors and simple shapes as the basis of your mobile site’s design.
- Make Links and Buttons Easy to Click: Most mobile users will be using their fingers instead of a mouse to navigate your site. That makes it more difficult to select precise areas on the page — to help your visitors out, make clickable elements large and surround them with plenty of white space. Also, keep in mind that while it makes sense to feature buttons at the top of the page for your desktop version, this is an especially awkward area for the user to select with their thumb when using a smartphone.
- Use an Alternative for Hover Effects: Hover effects are an intuitive feature of desktop ecommerce sites. You can set them up so that by simply moving their cursor over a product image, the user can quickly see the available color choices, a zoomed-in view of the product, or some other option. But hover effects aren’t possible on mobile devices, so you’ll need to come up with an alternative, such as text instructions that read “Click to Zoom”.
- Break Up Your Written Content: Even on the desktop version of your site, it’s always a good idea to favor short paragraphs over long ones and generously use headings to make your content as easy to consume as possible. This is even more important for your mobile version, as dense walls of text are especially frustrating when the visitor has a smaller screen to work with.
- Test Continuously: Just because the mobile version of your site functions flawlessly on a Google Chrome browser doesn’t mean it does so on an Apple Safari browser. You should be testing your site on these browsers regularly to ensure there are no flaws that need to be fixed. And while Chrome and Safari are by far the most popular browsers, you should also consider that many of your visitors may be using the Samsung Internet browser, which comes pre-loaded on all Samsung Galaxy devices.
Wrap up
Not only will mobile-friendliness have a significant impact on your ranking in Google search results but it will provide consumers with a better user experience. Hence following these tips and you’ll be able to make your ecommerce site much more mobile-friendly, which will in turn lead to more visitors and more sales.