Tips for eCommerce Mobile Optimization
As BFCM and the holiday season nears, it’s imperative to ensure your eCommerce store ticks all the boxes. This years BFCM is expected to be exponentially bigger than previous years, due to COVID-19’s lingering presence. As a result, you need to ensure you’re prepared to take part in one of the biggest days in history. In terms of preparation, we’ve covered how to secure stock at the best prices and how to effectively market and package your products. Today, we’re taking a closer look at optimizing your store for mobile. Let’s breakdown each of these Tips for eCommerce Mobile Optimization:
1. Site Speed
This may be an obvious one, but there’s nothing more annoying than a slow website. Ultimately, this frustrates the customer and denies you the opportunity of getting conversions. Although this is relevant to your entire site, its estimated that more than 50% of online traffic comes from mobile phones, which is why optimizing your site speed is so important.
Here are a few things you can do to increase the speed of your site:
- Enable caching
- Remove unnecessary plugins
- Optimize and reduce the size of your images
- Minimize your code
2. User-Friendly Navigation
Although visual appearance is important when it comes to your online store, functionality is a factor not to be overlooked, especially when it comes to mobile.
Generally, navigational features are often limited when it comes to mobile. Therefore, it’s important to make sure that your mobile site only includes the most important tabs and pages. This will ultimately allow your customers to navigate your store with ease, and reach checkout faster.
There are a few ways you can enhance navigation on your site:
- Include a search bar
- Minimise the number of clicks to checkout
- Include relevant and necessary labels to group products
- ie: Newly Arrived Products or Homeware
3. Optimize Images & Videos
Without optimizing your site for mobile, you will notice that most of your images or videos are not proportionate to your overall site or are distorted.
Since 94% of first impressions relate to website design, this is probably something you should adjust sooner than later.
Here are two ways to effectively reduce image size:
- Specify image resolution
- If you use WordPress, the plugin Lightbox would be useful for this.
- Compress your images
- Use Optimizilla or TinyPNG
4. Simplify your Content
This goes without saying, but we all know that quality over quantity is a rule to uphold when it comes to SEO. But more importantly, no one wants to be scrolling for hours on end to get to the necessary page or product they’re looking for. If your website is too content heavy, users may lose interest quickly, which in turn results in loss of potential conversions.
Keep these things in mind when simplifying content for your mobile site:
- Chunk your content
- Use headings, bullet points, images and styling (bold, italic) to keep the readers attention.
- Use shorter words
- Follow the “bite, snack, meal” approach to content:
- Bite: headline
- Snack: summary
- Meal: your main content
Conclusion
With a considerable shift happening from desktop to mobile viewing of eCommerce stores, it’s important to ensure your mobile site is optimized. This article looked at tips for eCommerce Mobile Optimization, covering site speed, navigation, images & videos, as well as content.
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