So, you built an e-commerce site for your photography studio. You add content and your products or services. You added plugins or apps that will serve your customer better like voice messaging and video messaging and help improve your ecommerce site.
You give your staff tools like screen recording or transcribing audio to text free to make sure they can serve your customers a lot better. You are doing a good job. However, running an e-commerce site or business is all about constantly improving.
So, what other ways can you improve your ecommerce site? Well, that’s what you are going to learn below.
Measure Everything
What can be measured can be improved. Hence, you want to ensure you have all the tracking tools. Once you have the crucial metrics, you can start tracking and improving.
For example, if you have a feature for video messaging your customers but they are not using it, that will show you that there might be a potential problem. And, that allows you the opportunity to fix it rather than not maximizing resources.
Take A Closer Look At Images
Be careful with images if you use them abundantly on your website since it can prolong loading times, which can lead to a bad customer experience. Generally, you don’t want to use images larger than 1,000 pixels as it will only waste rendering time. You’d also want to prioritize JPEGs as it loads faster.
If that’s not available, then a PNG is the second-best option. Also, you can use AI image generators and then automatically reduce the size of your images or convert them to JPEGs or PNGs with special plugins or apps.
Remove Unnecessary Plugins
It’s easy to go overboard with plugins as they are readily available, and they can do a myriad of seemingly cool things. However, plugins will tax the performance of your site.
Thus, only use the necessary ones such as voice messaging, screen recording, video messaging, SEO, and image optimizer to name a few examples.
Examine Third-Party Extensions
Same with plugins, third-party extensions may heavily tax your website and may ruin the customer experience. Using an appropriate amount isn’t harmful. It’s when you go overboard that causes a lot of problems. Thus, review your current extensions and only use the necessary ones.
Optimize TTFB
TTFB stands for Time To First Byte. This is when the user receives the first bytes of data. You’d want to optimize TTFB. Google recommends it to be lower than 200 ms. Optimizing TTFB is similar to getting your foot in the door, which is crucial.
Reduce HTTP Requests
Every time a user wants to load something from your website, it asks from the server. More requests can overload the server. Hence, employ strategies that can help reduce the request. For one, you can use software such as Spritebox, CssSpritegen, and CSS Sprites Generator.
Consider Changing Hosting Service
Most e-commerce sites will start with a hosting plan that can handle the currently expected load. As the site grows, it’s easy to forget that you are still using the old hosting plan, which may not be able to handle the current load. Hence, consider upgrading your hosting plan or changing a hosting service.
Cloudways is a great option because they specialize in WordPress hosting and make the process easy for you. Plus, they offer a free trial so you can test out their services before making a commitment.
Upgrading hosting plans may also open up new tools for free such as voice messaging, SEO, and email marketing.
Use CDN
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. The idea is that your content is spread across different servers across the globe. Doing so increases the load times no matter where the person is located in the world.
Optimize For Mobile Performance
Nowadays, most people are browsing the net through the use of smartphones and tablets. Hence, you may want to optimize the site’s code to load faster for such devices. If you don’t have any experience in website optimization, you should definitely hire an eCommerce web developer to get the job done.
Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is a technique that optimizes the top portion of the page to load faster. Again, this is similar to getting your foot in the door. It’s a very useful technique if you have plenty of content below the top area of your page.
Minify Code
Google Developers invented the mechanism known as “minification.” It’s a process of removing bad codes and also compacting the code. Fewer codes will allow your web pages to load faster and less taxing on your servers.
Github is an excellent resource for looking for a minified code for just about anything, including voice messaging, tracking, and more.
Broken Links And Redirects
Broken links will cause a bad user experience and also hurt your SEO. Hence, clean up your site to ensure that broken links are minimized. A 302 redirect is also to be avoided at all costs as it can harm your SEO efforts.
Wrapping It All Up
If you want to increase your chances of success in this new competitive world, perhaps your best bet is to constantly improve your ecommerce site. The tips above should point you in the right direction. Also, you’d want to use the latest tools to help give you an edge.