If your business has an online store, you could be missing out on a large amount of revenue. if you’re making any of these mistakes, it is not only costly in dollars and cents, but also a waste of your invested time and effort.
We’ve put together this list of interesting eCommerce facts that show where you might be missing sales opportunities. These show what makes customers more likely to buy and even increase how much they spend. Then we’ll show you how to fix some common problems and start giving your customers a better eCommerce experience. That means more money for your business.
Why are Customers Not Buying From You?
- A one second delay in loading an ecommerce page can lead to a 26% drop in conversions (Akamai)
- 43% of online shoppers have reported making purchases while in bed. (Sailthru)
- Increasing Mobile site speed by just .1 second can increase conversions by 8.4% and order size by 9.2% (Deloitte)
- Using an SSL certificate caused one business to see a 27% increase in business (Katawetawaraks/Wang)
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load (neilpatel.com)
How Does Your Site Rate?
So, how do you stack up? See any mistakes that worry you? We get it. Time is of the essence on almost every aspect of your business. Things get set aside or feel like too big a project to take on.
The good news is that there are many steps you can take that can pay off immediately. First, these major issues are highly focused on how fast and secure your site is. Let’s look at both of these areas as a start:
Page Load Speed
Speed is really the single biggest overall factor in maximizing your Digital Sales. Making your site faster is a complex topic, but it doesn’t have to be intimidating. In fact, there are some great online tools you can use to evaluate the performance of your site and start to identify the specifics of what is holding your eCommerce store from maximizing the sales you could be receiving. Here are a couple of the ones we use at Two Row Studio to evaluate our clients’ sites.
Google Pagespeed Insights
Google has actually done a lot to help people use the web better. Their analysis tool (https://pagespeed.web.dev/) can be used by anyone and provides some good information about how you can improve yours.
It’ll give you a score for both Mobile devices and Desktops as well as listing out the most important things slowing your site down.
UPDATE!
We recently found out about a great tool that you can run to analyze your entire site’s speed. This tool (https://www.experte.com/pagespeed) from https://www.experte.com lets you first all the pages on your site at once through the Google page speed analysis and then identify specific pages with the biggest opportunity to improve.
GT Metrix
We also like to use GT Metrix to give us a few extras that Google Pagespeed doesn’t offer. GT Metrix gives you a version of the Google Pagespeed score, but also analyzes your page from various locations so you can see how people experience your site in different parts of the world. GT Metrix also gives a little bit more information about how the files are being served up so if you are using 3rd party extensions, etc. They show a “Waterfall” view of the files that get loaded so you can see if any of those extensions are particularly troublesome to your site’s performance because of how long they are taking to respond, download, or if they are blocked by other pre-requisites.
Site Security
Security is something that everyone basically has to commit to. It means making sure data traffic to and from your site are encrypted. Businesses also have to make sure everyone with access to the site has good passwords and that they are kept secret. Finally, businesses need to make sure the code running the site is secure and updated whenever new exploits are found that could endanger that. One tool we’ve used is Sucuri’s website scanner which gives you a way to ensure you don’t have known malware or other big security problems.
See How Much You Might Be Missing
Tell Us About You
E-Commerce Revenue Improvements
Fixing the Problems
So how do you eat a whale? One bite at a time, of course. Let’s lay out the 4-course meal we think will start to pay off for you and your eCommerce program. They are listed in order of relative ease. Each will bring a big impact as you dig in to each one.
Speed up your Server Response
Where your website is hosted really matters. Sharing a server with other websites means you don’t always get the speed you should be from your host. If your website is hosted on a traditional platform or using custom coded HTML and/or other web technologies, you have choices. This is true of Content Management Systems (CMSs) such as WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla as well. You have the opportunity to compare the performance of your current hosting plan and even provider to seek an upgrade.
It might seem daunting, but in truth, moving a site to another server isn’t a terribly risky thing to do and can be done with a very limited window of downtime if it is prepared appropriately. Doing so can easily ensure your site loads in a fraction of the time it currently loads. Instead of 7 seconds, it could load in half the time – or even faster – without changing a thing about your website’s structure, technology, or content.
Use a “Server Army” to Deliver Content Faster
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are a way to distribute the traffic for your site across a network of servers. Instead of people from Europe, Australia, Asia, and the Americas all requesting access to your store through the same network connection, CPU, and other hardware that make a server run, you can have clones of your site set up spread out around the globe so that each of them is getting the content quicker.
CDNs are easy to set up and are offered by a number of different services such as CloudFlare or Fastly
Secure Data To, From, and On Your Site
There’s no longer a (good) reason to not have a security certificate for your website. Why do they matter? Well, without one, the data sent to and from your website is able to be read by anyone with the ability to intercept the traffic. With a certificate, you can establish secure encryption between your site and the browsers your customers are using to access it. You can now obtain free certificates that automatically update on a regular basis through Let’s Encrypt.
You can also further secure data on your site through a very simple step. Making sure you have longer passwords for anyone who accesses your site, you can make it exponentially harder for a brute force attack to break a password.
Finally, with a little extra effort, you can make sure 2-Factor security is in place. Requiring 2-factor helps protect the site even when passwords are hacked. Implementation on such systems varies from site to site, but are available as extensions to most every platform.
Stay Up to Date with Security Patches
Not every security hole works by breaking in using a set of user credentials. Many major types of exploits are because the programming that runs a website can have flaws. Those flaws can be exploited by hackers to gain access to sensitive areas of the website and cause problems.
Fortunately, the developers writing that code usually review their code to both improve how the code works and secure it against any new exploits being found by hackers. In fact, much of the new code released for software of any kind is related to security improvements. That makes it very important to ensure your site is consistently updated so that it doesn’t become a target for hackers.
(Re)Design for More Performance
Overall, there may be some point at which you need to change the underlying structure of various pages or even the site itself to get the better performance from your eCommerce site. Mobile phone user experiences often require design changes to help people navigate differently and updating on-site media to next-gen formats for quicker downloads could require some bigger changes.