Converting Browsers Into Buyers? These WooCommerce Optimizations Will Blow Your Mind

Will my site live up to client expectations? Is my site too slow? Where can I make improvements?

These are just a few questions that keep many e-commerce owners up at night. Whichever way you cut it WooCommerce optimization is never that far from any store owner’s mind.

It’s no surprise. Every single year that passes, e-commerce customers demand faster sites, more personalization, and seamless delivery. This makes WooCommerce optimization less of an option and more of a necessity for any business that wants to survive in this competitive marketplace.

Your WooCommerce platform may be in a good shape, however, there is always space for improvement. A few tweaks here and there may be just what you need to improve your customer experience.

1. Optimize Your Media

The jury is no longer still out on the idea that media plays a crucial role in the success of an e-commerce site. A few photos here, some videos there, and some emojis in between may be just what an e-commerce site needs to increase its conversion rates.

This is easier said than done. Without necessary optimization, a business may never reap the fruits of its media integration.

2. Photo Optimization

A picture is worth a thousand stories, and a few bucks in e-commerce. That said, the role of quality images in e-commerce cannot be overstated; just using two product images instead of one can double purchases in an online shop. But there’s a catch.

Higher quality images take up more space, slow down the UX, and may spill over into customer experience making it unbearable. This creates the urgent need for image compression to ensure that quality images take up as little space as possible. Luckily, there are plugins like Tiny PNG, Smush, ShortPixel that make image compression less of a hassle.

3. Video Optimization

The use of videos holds a special place in the success stories of most online- marketplaces. If a picture tells a thousand stories, a video is a thousand pictures. However, accompanying each product with a video is one of the surest ways to slow down your site and piss off your customers.

For one, video compression can aid a website to reduce the amount of space their videos take up in their website operations. Plugins and tools like Wondershare Video Converter and FormatFactory offer excellent video compression.

Self-hosting offers the easiest way out. Hosting your product videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo greatly reduces the impact on a site’s performance. This is one of the best ways to optimize your WooCommerce platform for videos.

4. Speed Up Your Site

Time is money, in e-commerce more than anywhere else. Studies show that 3 seconds wait is too long for any e-commerce customer. More time than this and you might lose 60% of your customers. With this in mind, tools like Page Speed Insights (Google) and Pingdom Website Speed Test (Solar Winds) can help you measure how fast your site is.

A slow site is however not the end of the road, with these few optimizations, you can kiss those days of slower websites goodbye.

5. Use A Content Delivery Network

Oblivious to many WooCommerce sites, the distance between their global customers and their server location matters. An increased distance leads to low latencies and load balancing that leads to slower sites and well, enraged customers.

Using a Content Delivery Network goes a long way to shorten load times for global customers who may not have the luxury of living in close proximity to a server. A CDN gives a business access to data centers and proxy servers that are distributed geographically close to a site-user. A good example of a CDN network is Cloud flare

6. Set Up A Caching Solution

One key suspect that leads to low loading times and poor performance is the use of traditional servers with the absence of caching. Anyone in E-Commerce has probably heard of a cache one time too many and it’s time they use it to optimize their WooCommerce platforms.

In a typical website, for a client to access a service, they have to load pages, processes, and transactions from the RAM and databases; something that takes a lot of time and money. Next time, they then have to repeat the same process.

A cache temporarily stores vital data on the pages, processes, and transactions so that the next time the customer visits the site, they no longer have to repeat the entire process.

This architecture greatly reduces load times and improves customer satisfaction. A good place to start your search for a reliable caching system is Comet cache

7. Deal With Inefficiencies

Any article about WooCommerce optimization is incomplete without a mention of inefficient systems. Inefficient systems refer to systems that have a lower return on investment and whose running causes significant drag on your bottom line bottom-line and growth

8. Choosing Reliable And Fast Hosting

In e-commerce, an unreliable Host is the mother of all inefficient systems. Believe me, there are plenty of areas in your e-commerce site to cut costs on and compromise quality; your WebHost is not one of them.

We all know that shared hosting is a darling for e-commerce startups and budget-strapped websites. It’s the perfect low-cost high-functionality option that fits the needs of many startups. However, using shared hosting comes with its fair share of issues. These include lower load times and compromise on data due to its shared nature.

For a better overall performance consider Cloud VPS hosting over Shared Hosting. Cloud VPS hosting offers a better solution to handle high-traffic, spikes, and in-depth security.

9. Constantly Review Plugins

The vast number of themes and plugins at the disposal of WooCommerce users is both a blessing and a curse for many e-commerce platforms.

The use of too many low-quality and unnecessary plug-ins may compromise website speed, security, and even functionality.

The best ways to ensure that your e-commerce site reaps the fruits of plug-ins without accruing any necessary disadvantages is to:

•         Keep your plugins up-to-date
•         Delete plugins that outlived their usefulness
•         Keep the number of plugins as low as possible

10. Cart Abandonment Solutions

The impact of cart-abandonment is one giant iceberg that is often ignored. To put it in context, an average of 69% of carts are abandoned by users. If that’s not enough, 45% of cart-abandonment-emails are opened and of this half of them reconsider and make purchases.

Online businesses lose a lot of traffic and potential conversions to cart abandonment, this creates an urgent need for optimization for cart abandonment solutions.

Platforms like Jilt and Abandoned Cart Lite go a long way to offer cart abandonment integrations and ensure that nothing is left to chance.

11. Improve Customer Experience

There is a lot to be said in the way of improving customer experience. The customer and their importance is an anthem that business owners hear too many times.

However, the intricacies of optimizing WooCommerce to improve customer experience is where many stop. We won’t.

These are some tips to optimize your WooCommerce platform for an excellent customer experience.

12. Embrace Singularity

The instinct of most e-commerce owners is to fill landing pages with as many offers as possible. However noble these intentions, nothing could be more misleading.

When it comes to User Experience less of everything goes a long way. Just by moving from four separate CTAs to one, Whirlpool increased its click-through rate by 42%. Fewer distractions, fewer options, and fewer focal points may just be the spark your online business needs to increase purchases.

13. Mobile Optimization

It has never been more apparent that mobile, is the future of e-commerce. The share of mobile e-commerce sales has increased 39.1% from 52.4% in 2016 to its current 72.9%. This trend is not stopping anytime soon.

One way to stay one-step-ahead of this trend is to optimize your WooCommerce platform for mobile. This shift is important given that if the current trends hold, most of your customer visits will be from mobile phones.

These are a few options and plugins that make mobile optimization a lot less of a hassle.

•         App Presser-Create a customizable mobile app with Word Press Integrations
•         WooCommerce Product Search-WP plugin with live search, filters, and analytics
•         WooCommerce Social Login-Enables shoppers to access their accounts via social logins

14. Voice Commerce

In their never-ending desire for more convenience and ease, e-commerce customers have been embracing Voice search by the numbers. And it shows in the statistics, by 2020 voice commerce is expected to reach $40billion, which is approximately 50% of all searches.

Optimizing your WooCommerce platform is one way to be ready once this new frontier takes center stage., Well how? One can optimize for e-commerce by:

•         Use the WooCommerce Google Product Feed extension to sync the products in your online store with Google Shopping
•         Claim your business on Google My Business
•         Build a Skill for Amazon Alexa to enable your customers to order your products using Amazon Alexa

For more information on how to better optimize your WooCommerce Platform, contact us today and we will be more than willing to help.