OPTIMIZE YOUR E-COMMERCE WEBSITE FOR MOBILE

Mobile shopping is on the rise, day after day, year after year. Mobile now represents the majority of traffic to e-commerce stores (yes, that means over 50%).

So you better make sure that your e-commerce store is optimized for mobile.

You simply can’t afford not to do it. Not only will you lose out over 50% of your potential customers, but you will be penalized by search engines. Talk about a lose-lose.

How to Optimize Ecommerce Site for Mobile

Make Sure It’s Responsive

If your site doesn’t adjust to fit smaller screen sizes, you are essentially committing mobile e-commerce suicide. So make sure your site is responsive.

Unfortunately “converting” a non-mobile site to be responsive is not really an option. So if your site isn’t responsive, either get someone to create one mobile site for you or switch to a theme that is responsive.

Get Up to Speed

This is paramount. About 40% of people will abandon a web page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

If your mobile site doesn’t load incredibly quickly, potential customers will just move on to another site that does.

Here are some tips to increase your site speed:

Get Rid of the Fluff

On mobile, get rid of all of the non-essential animations and javascript. Get rid of the fluff. Not only does this slow your site down, but it also often takes away from the user experience on mobile. Remember, Simplicity in design equals excellence in performance!

Optimize Images

Optimize your site’s images. Nothing kills site speeds like oversized images. Use this tool if you need to optimize your images. Fortunately, many e-commerce platforms optimize your images for you when you upload them to your site, but do check to make sure.

Simplify Your UI

It’s really important to have a clear and simple UI for mobile. With limited screen real estate, you must put the most important things at the top of each page and remove any non-essentials. Include clear call to actions as a guide through the purchase path.

I also recommend disabling any popups or alerts that might get in the way of the purchase process on mobile.

Simplify Your Checkout

Checkout is one of the biggest issues on mobile. Even at its best, this is a point of friction for mobile shoppers. Entering a ton of information (billing and shipping information along with payment details) on a tiny screen just isn’t fun.

So limit the fields you require as much as possible and make sure that your checkout is as mobile-friendly as possible. Many platforms do this for you.

Even so, there is still a lot of information to be input, so add apple pay and android pay as payment options on your store. These payment methods are a massive step forward in mobile shopping. Instead of painfully typing in all of that information, customers can simply place their thumbs over their thumb readers, and voila! Payment made.

This will surely increase your mobile conversion rate.

I hope you’ve learned something new and that your imagination is now running wild with all the possibilities for your business. If you’d like to share your ideas or need help, I’m always open to new conversations on LinkedIn. You may also contact me or schedule a video consultation.