Is your online store ready for launch? Has your eCommerce web developer already created your eCommerce website and now waiting for your confirmation to launch?
Wait. Here are a few checkpoints that you need to go through before you confirm your eCommerce developer to make the online store live.
#1 Have you checked meta tags?
Meta tags optimization is one of the important ingredients for a perfect and successful SEO recipe. Have you ensured that all the product pages along with other web pages have titles and meta descriptions in place? If not, get it done right away.
In my experience, I have noticed many times that most WordPress website developers won’t care to install SEO plugins on their clients’ online stores. So, you should raise your self-awareness and get the basic plugins installed before you launch your eCommerce website.
#2 Cache & speed performance
How is it possible for an eCommerce business to succeed unless its website loading speed is optimized? In other words, how can your prospective customers buy the products from your online store when they have to wait longer for each webpage to load?
Before you confirm your web developer to make your eCommerce website live, make sure that your website has the necessary speed performance plugins installed and activated.
You may use online tools like http://tools.pingdom.com to test the loading speed of your online store.
Recommended post: 7 Actions to take for enhancing the loading speed of your website
#3 Responsive web design
A mobile-friendly (responsive web design) eCommerce is as important as its own existence. I can’t even think of a website today that doesn’t have a mobile-friendly view.
Considering the fact that most online users access websites through their mobile devices, you must ensure that your online store is fully responsive, especially the shopping cart and checkout process.
In order to test a website for responsive web design, you can use some free online tools like Mobile-Friendly Test by Google
Bonus tip: Having a responsive website is good not only for great user experience but also for search engine optimization.
Recommended post: 5 Tips to ensure the responsiveness of your website design
#4 Payment links
I know this sounds like a no-brainer tip, but it’s worth checking out. During the web development process, the web developers team would use test payment credentials to check the whole functionality of an eCommerce website. But sometimes (although in rare cases), they forget to replace it with the real credentials.
You may want to test this out yourself by making a small transaction (maybe $1) just to ensure that your merchant account receives the money.
#5 Product image quality
Needless to mention the importance of product image quality for the success of an eCommerce website. Because you know that you expect the users to pay online for products that they’ve never seen, it becomes important to display your products with high-quality images only.
Failure to use high-quality images can result in low sales & revenue from your online store.
#6 Check for broken links
Broken links are those links that lead to 404 (page not found) pages when we click them. It hampers not only user experience but also SEO. This usually happens when a page is removed from the website but there are still some texts linking to that page.
Thankfully, WordPress eCommerce websites can be monitored easily for broken links with the help of useful plugins like Broken Links Checker
Recommended post: 4 Best SEO plugins for your WordPress eCommerce website
#7 Tracking scripts
Before launching your eCommerce store, make sure to have the necessary trackers in place e.g. Google Analytics. With the help of these trackers, you can view (on the Google Analytics dashboard) the behavior of users on your newly built online store.
You may also like to use Heatmap to capture and track the users’ movements on your website. If you are running Facebook advertising or PPC advertising (Google Adwords) campaigns to grow your online sales, you must make sure to have conversion trackers installed on the necessary pages of your website.
Recommended post: 7 Checklists for your eCommerce website to get more conversions
