A website can never be considered a finished product. With the ever-changing technologies & customers’ behavior, it is critical to spot the weaknesses of your website and get them fixed on time.
It’s even more important to fix or overhaul your website if you run an eCommerce business.
Why?
Simply because your eCommerce website helps you to make sales, fulfill orders & receive payments.
But how & when you should consider revamping your existing eCommerce website? Are there any triggers or signs that help you to identify the obsoleteness of your eCommerce store?
Well, the answer to these questions is ‘Yes’.
In this blog post, I will be sharing 5 triggers that send critical signals to you for redesigning your eCommerce store.
Let’s go through them one by one.
#1 Mobile Compatibility Issues
Given the fact that more than 70% of users browse the web/internet through their mobile devices, it won’t be really wise to ignore the importance of responsiveness (mobile compatibility) of a website.
If you are running your eCommerce store for a while already, I bet you know that social media plays an important role in sending relevant traffic to your website. But at the same time, do you know that more than 75% of the social media audience use their mobile devices while they are on their favorite social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter?
If your eCommerce website doesn’t have a responsive web design, it makes sense to overhaul the design and this time, make it responsive.
You don’t necessarily need to redevelop the whole website. If you are satisfied with the functionalities and features of your website, you can simply hire an eCommerce web designer to change the theme/skin/design of your website.
Getting a nice-looking website is not the ultimate goal of any business. We all know that getting business out of a website is more important than just setting up a website in the first place.
When it comes to getting sales from an eCommerce website, search engines can’t be ignored. If your website gets a good amount of relevant traffic from search engines, you will definitely get more business.
But what if you don’t get enough or any traffic from search engines? Hmm, this is something serious and definitely has to do with your website.
Perhaps, search engines don’t like your website? Can be possible.
Getting low or no traffic from search engines is another trigger that helps you make yourself aware of the urgency to redesign your website. Search for the best web developers who are proficient in search engine optimization techniques too. Hire them and get your eCommerce website overhauled.
#3 Obsolete Web Design
When the design of your eCommerce website looks obsolete or dull, you must consider redesigning your website. Of course, the design of your website is one of the important factors that determine your business’s success. Because the better design your website has, the lower will be the bounce rate.
In other words, visitors would love to spend time on your website if your web design looks good. The more time they spend, the higher will be the chances that they will buy from you.
How you should know whether your eCommerce website looks obsolete or not?
Well, there are 3 ways to determine this.
a) Use your own instinct. Yes, if you really trust your own instinct and feel that your website doesn’t look good as compared to your competitors’ websites, get it changed.
b) Use web analytics tools. With the help of reliable web analytics tools like Google Analytics, you can figure out the bounce rate of your website. Although there is no hard rule to determine the good or bad bounce rate of a website, if your analytics tool shows a bounce rate of more than 50%, it’s a terrible sign that you must hire a web designer and get your eCommerce website redeveloped.
c) Ask experts. There are many webmaster forums where you can signup and ask the feedback on your website.
For me, using a web analytics tool works well to figure out whether you need a redesign or not.
Many studies & articles have proved that a website’s speed has a direct impact on its sales. A slow-loading website is a major deterrent, as the average online user will only tolerate a loading time of up to 3 or max 6 seconds.
Your potential customers can really get frustrated with your website if they find that they have to wait for ages for pages to load. Therefore, it definitely makes sense to improve your page load speed as much as possible.
How to check the website loading speed?
There are several reliable yet free online tools available to test your website for its loading speed. Pingdom (http://tools.pingdom.com) is the best example of such a tool.
Ok, so your website looks good, has a responsive web design, and loads faster. Even then you may not make enough sales out of it. What could go wrong?
Maybe your checkout process is not user-friendly and therefore your potential customers don’t complete their orders. In other words, if your website has a high order abandonment rate, it’s a critical sign that you must revamp your eCommerce website, especially your checkout process.
Conclusion
Running an eCommerce website successfully is an ongoing journey rather than a destination. No matter how old is your business, you must make sure that your website always stands out from the crowd of both old and new competitors.
