The Ultimate eCommerce Optimization Guide for WooCommerce Stores
Having a sound strategy for your eCommerce business is vital to its success. If you’re not regularly optimizing your WooCommerce store, you could be missing out on a lot of potential sales.
Fortunately, there are several things you can do to increase conversions on your site. Best practices such as streamlining your checkout process and making your site mobile-friendly can help you grow your online business.
In this post, we’ll explain what eCommerce optimization is and when to use it. Then, we’ll give you some tips on how to optimize your WooCommerce store to improve your conversion rate. Let’s dive in!
What is eCommerce Optimization?
In a nutshell, eCommerce optimization is the process of creating the best possible experience for your site visitors. It involves identifying areas of improvement in your online store, and making any necessary changes to boost its performance. This may help increase your conversion rate.
A conversion rate is the percentage of people who take action on your site. When a user visits your online store, they might browse your products to see if there’s anything they like and add items to their cart.
Then, they might either leave without making a purchase (known as cart abandonment) or follow through and complete an order. Any visitor who buys something from your store contributes to your conversion rate.
With eCommerce optimization, you can encourage users to make purchases in your store. For example, you could provide a quicker checkout process, use high-quality photos for your products, and make personalized recommendations.
Why is eCommerce Conversion Optimization Important?
In order to have a successful WooCommerce site, it is essential to have a high conversion rate.
If you’re hovering at the industry standard of 2.5 to 3 percent, you have a pretty good rate. However, you might want to work towards a higher percentage.
Your conversion rate is directly tied to your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of boosting your visibility in search engine results to generate more traffic to your site.
SEO is a crucial element for eCommerce stores. The more traffic you can drive to your page, the more likely it is for people to buy things from your store. You can optimize your eCommerce store by performing keyword research, compressing your images, and improving the speed of your site.
When Do You Know You Need Optimization?
There are several warning signs that indicate poor performance. Knowing what to look for can help you take certain steps to make improvements to your website.
For example, if your WooCommerce store has a high bounce rate, users could be exiting your site due to slow loading times. A bounce rate is when site visitors leave your page shortly after landing on it.
The average bounce rate for eCommerce sites is 42 percent. Fortunately, you can decrease it by optimizing your site.
Another sign is low traffic. You can see how many visits your site gets by using a tool like Google Analytics. If you’re not happy with your numbers, you’ll need to make some modifications to drive more traffic.
Poor engagement rates could also indicate problems with your site. If visitors aren’t clicking on your Call to Action (CTA) buttons or sharing your content, you may want to optimize your store to encourage user interaction.
6 Tips to Improve Your eCommerce Strategy
Now that you know what eCommerce optimization is and when to implement it, it’s time to look at some ways to improve your site’s performance. We’ve rounded up six ways to boost sales and conversion rates on your online store.
1. Optimize for Mobile Devices
You might already have an excellent website with a beautiful design and all the elements required to run an online store. However, if it isn’t mobile-friendly, you might be alienating a large percentage of your visitors.
According to Oberlo, over 72 percent of online sales are made on mobile devices. Therefore, it’s vital to make sure that your site is optimized for smaller screens.
First, you’ll want to choose a responsive WordPress theme for your eCommerce site, such as Divi:
Another way to optimize for mobile devices is to ensure that your text is clear and legible on smaller screens. Additionally, your pages should be clean and simple to help improve load times.
2. Improve Speed and Load Time
A slow-loading site can drive visitors away. According to Pingdom, a website that takes more than three seconds to load has (on average) a 38 percent bounce rate.
To improve your page load times, you can start by reducing the number of plugins on your site and optimizing your images. Additionally, you’ll want to use a fast and reliable WordPress hosting service.
At WP Engine, our WooCommerce hosting plans are designed to help you increase your average sales by up to 18 percent:
Our proprietary smart cache technology can make your store pages load twice as fast. Additionally, our Live Cart feature eliminates the lag caused by the cart fragment script, contributing to a smoother user experience.
3. Use High-Quality Product Images
Using high-quality images on your product pages can help increase your conversion rates. According to Shopify, 75 percent of online shoppers rely on photos when making a decision about a potential purchase.
Eye-catching visuals can help increase visitor engagement and entice users to buy a product:
You might want to upload photos of the product from different sides and angles. Additionally, you can add a zoom feature to your images to help users engage better with your content.
Something to keep in mind when adding images to your website is file size. Large image files can slow down your site, prompting potential buyers to abandon the page.
You can use an image optimization tool like TinyPNG to compress your photos:
This tool reduces image file size without harming the quality of your photos. By compressing your media files, you can lighten the load on your website and increase its speed.
4. Personalize Your Content
Making your site visitors feel special can help you increase sales. A simple way to do this is to tailor your content to the needs and preferences of each user.
For instance, you can recommend related products based on a user’s recent viewings. This technique is known as cross-selling, and can prompt users to add more items to their carts. You can use a WooCommerce extension like Product Recommendations to create an effective cross-sell strategy.
Additionally, you can use a geolocation tool to display prices in the customer’s local currency:
WooCommerce integrates with MaxMind Geolocation. This tool enables shop owners to automatically display tax rates and shipping methods that are specific to a customer’s location.
5. Streamline Your Checkout Process
Optimizing your checkout process is vital if you want to increase your conversions. Keeping things as smooth as possible should encourage users to complete their orders.
For instance, you can provide multiple payment methods for a more convenient shopping experience:
It’s also a good idea to offer a guest checkout option. This way, users won’t have to create an account on your site to make their first purchases.
Streamlining the shopping experience will shorten the steps between browsing and completing an order. In this way, a quick and easy checkout process can encourage more sales.
6. Perform On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your site for search engines. This means increasing your visibility in relevant search results. If users can’t find your eCommerce site, they won’t be able to buy your products.
There are many different ways to improve your SEO in WooCommerce. You can start by optimizing your product titles. Titles can help describe the products to your customers, but they also enable search crawlers to index your pages and display them in relevant results.
You can use a tool like Yoast SEO to perform on-page SEO on your eCommerce site. This plugin will help you write optimized titles and meta descriptions for your products:
You can also improve your site’s SEO by using alt text for your images. This is a description of the photo, and it enables search crawlers to better understand what your content is about. It also makes your product pages accessible to individuals who use screen readers.
Conclusion
If your eCommerce site isn’t optimized, you could be missing out on sales. By improving certain aspects of your online store, you can boost your conversion rates and drive more traffic to your product pages.
To summarize, here are six ways to improve your eCommerce strategy:
- Optimize your pages for mobile devices by using a responsive WordPress theme.
- Improve your page speed by choosing a reliable WordPress host such as WP Engine.
- Use high-quality images of your products and compress them to improve load times.
- Personalize your content by using cross-selling techniques and geolocation tools.
- Streamline the checkout process on your site.
- Optimize your product pages with a tool like Yoast SEO.
At WP Engine, we offer high-performance hosting for your eCommerce site. Our plans include proprietary caching, Instant Store Search, and more. Check out our WooCommerce hosting plans today!
