Improving the user experience (UX) has a great impact on increasing the traffic of your website which is an important factor especially for eCommerce websites that need to optimize SEO (read more about SEO for e-commerce websites) and attract more customers to boost their sales.
The statistics about the most important factors influencing on User Experience (UX) of Ecommerce websites revealed that it’s crucial to consider two below aspects:
- The speed of loading webpages
- The appearance and interface of the online store
Let’s see why these factors are a matter for improving the user experience and how to improve them.
The effect of loading page speeds on improving user experience
A lot of investigations have been performed to evaluate the factors influencing the customer experience of online stores. These researches revealed that most online shoppers expect to experience a fast and smooth purchase during online shopping. So, they prefer to purchase from those eCommerce websites that let them do the process of shopping faster and easier.
The results obtained from a conducted survey by “Think with Google” about the expectations of customers experiencing online shopping show that 53% of online shoppers left an eCommerce website with a loading time of more than 3 secs and 73% of them tried to place their orders on other online stores.
There are also some remarkable statistics from Akamai suggesting that 100 msec. delay in loading web pages decreases the conversion rate by 7%.
Reviewing these statistics revealed that speeding up Ecommerce websites has a vital effect on improving the user experience because you have to keep your customers satisfied and deceive them that shopping from your store has a lot of advantages compared to your competitors. Amazon recently announced that if the speed of its loading pages decreases just by 1 sec, it will lose $1.6 billion, annually.
So, the purpose of speeding up an E-Commerce website is to perform some suitable actions to make all pages of your website load faster which in turn has a significant impact on:
- Making customers enjoy a purchase from your website
- Improving SEO to have a better ranking in the search engine results
- Increasing ROI to boost your sales and make more money
How to speed up loading of webpages
To speed up the loading of web pages, at first, you need to find out the reasons that make your website loading slow. There are some free and useful online tools helping you in this way, including:
To evaluate the speed of your website, you just need to enter the URL of your page and click on start then you will see a report like below:
In this report, the performance of your e-commerce website is evaluated and a lot of useful information is in your hand such as:
- The total loading time of your webpage
- The size of this webpage
- The HTTP requests total number
- First Contentful Paint (FCP)
- DOM Content Loaded (DCL) score
Don’t forget to save these results to compare them later after optimization. If the load time reported by these online tools is not satisfying, you have to consider the following solutions to increase the speed of your webpage loading.
Read Also How Do I Build A Multi-Vendor Marketplace App And Start Making Money?
Top Tips to Speed up your Ecommerce store
There are numerous optimization techniques to be used for speeding up ECommerce websites and improving the user experience, however, you need to choose the best and most useful ones by considering the reasons that put your e-commerce website in trouble of slowing speed.
By using some of the below tricks, the loading speed of your eCommerce website will fall off the acceptable range:
- Trying to support your online store with high-quality Hosting and use a CDN to Deliver Static Resources
- Minifying HTML and CSS codes and combining CSS and JavaScript files
- Eliminating render-blocking resources and keeping external scripts to a minimum
- Optimizing website settings for performance, for example by preventing receiving reviews for your products
- Installing a fast Theme for your online store and optimizing google fonts
- Compressing images for delivery optimization and optimizing your images and Lazy-load images and videos
- Mount up your website database regularly and strip unused scripts and stylesheets
- Cache your website to speed it up
As we mentioned above, you don’t need to use all of these techniques at once to speed up your E-commerce website. After optimization by 3 or 4 of them, test the speed of your website again and compare the results. If the loading time of your web pages looks good on the test report, there is no need to get through other options. It’s time to improve the user experience by other methods such as changing the user interface and appearance of your eCommerce website.
The appearance and interface of the online store
Enhancing your E-commerce website's user interface (UI) and appearances is really necessary for improving your customer experiences and boosting your sales.
According to Statista, the following features have the most impact on making a great user experience (UX) for web development or mobile application development:
All of these factors are related to the interface of your website. That’s why the appearance and UI of online stores really matter for improving user experience (UX).
How to enhance the appearance and interface of an online store
The only way for increasing and boosting an E-commerce website’s sales is to encourage more potential customers to visit your website by offering a customer-friendly interface while they want to purchase the products.
So, it is obvious that you have to consider the best strategies to firstly make your online store more visible and secondly make a better experience of purchasing from your eCommerce website for your customers to encourage them to buy more products to boost your sales.
Here are some useful suggestions for improving the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design of your eCommerce website:
Choose a fast and attractive Theme
Choosing a fast-loading and eye-catching Theme is the most important factor for keeping your customers satisfied and improving the user experience as well.
Your website Theme influences the aesthetics and performance of your online store. That’s why you need to install and activate an astonishing theme to improve the functionality of your eCommerce website.
There are a variety of free or premium themes available to be activated on your site, however, there is no guarantee that the premium ones are definitely better than the free ones. The only thing that matters is the power of that theme on enhancing the appearance of your e-commerce website and improving the performance and functionality of it according to your customer's taste.
Here are the most important features of an ideal theme:
Providing useful tools and options for Enhancing the UI/UX of your store
UI (User Interface) and UX (User experience) design are both indicators for evaluating how much customers love your online store. It’s not just limited to designing an attractive online shop with appealing visual elements or amazing product presentations, but it is also about making the process of purchasing products from your online store as fast and easy as possible by helping you to improve user experience through:
- Offering Easy navigation and creating effective menus, sidebars, and footer
- Displaying useful notifications, pop-ups, etc.
- Designing search and filter boxes to make finding products easier for your customers
- Creating Eye-catching call-to-action (CTA) buttons with special designs
- Building Customer-friendly check out page
- Using contrasting colors, appealing fonts, astonishing layout as well as image galleries to enhance the appearance of your website
Being responsive and optimized for Mobile-First Experience
According to a study performed by Statista, 46% of online shoppers across 37 countries used their smartphones or tablets to look for their required products on the eCommerce websites which means you need to definitely pay attention to the user interface and user experience of your website on mobile devices.
So, it is very important to use a responsive theme to make the product pages look well and load very fast and smoothly on mobile devices.
Offering customizable options for building web pages
The web pages displayed on your online store has a huge impact on the customer experiences, so, if you want to keep your visitors satisfied, it’s better to pick a theme that allows you to create well-designed web pages including:
- Product category page: A list of your products with their prices
- Contact us page: Contact information
- About us: Brief History and your main goal
- Blog page: Useful information and guides
- Shop page: Product list with add to cart option
- Account page: Sign up or Sign in page
Making integration with different communication channels available on the website
The communication channels available on the website matter for improving the user experience because this is the only way your customers can directly get in touch with you. You can also receive their feedback, solve their problems, and support them, which can improve the user experience.
To make this possible, the installed theme must have the options to let you integrate with the below communication channels:
- Contact forms for sending and receiving email
- Chatbots to have online chat with your customers
- Integration with social media pages such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Conclusion
We have tried in this post to introduce the most effective factors that influence improving user experience which in return can attract more customers to your website and boost your sales.
In the end, it is worth mentioning that to create and optimize the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design of your website, you need to get help from a professional web developer or mobile app developer with enough experience in building customer-friendly and well-performed eCommerce websites.
