E-Commerce Website Redesign
A website redesign aims to grow organic search traffic and boost click-through rates. During a redesign, we prefer to migrate the existing content and leave the visual and content updates for the following optimization phase. That approach provides the business with the analytics needed to guide the significant number of little decisions needed to cost justify the changes to the branding and content.
Page Design
A website redesign aims to grow organic search traffic and boost click-through rates. During a redesign, we prefer to migrate the existing content and leave the visual and content updates for the following optimization phase. That approach provides the business with the analytics needed to guide the significant number of little decisions needed to cost justify the changes to the branding and content.
Page Design
E-commerce websites require features and functionality that make them more complex than standard websites. Many sites have hundreds of products that need an organized and efficient content management process. They also have a structured taxonomy with pages for product details, product categories, and blogging.Product Details Page
A product details page needs the same attention to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a blogging page. That means the page has to answer questions relevant to real-world searches. That is more than a list of product specs. A well-designed page:- Use SEO keywords with the most search volume and least competition.
- Provide content relevant to land search results.
- Contain original text, images, and videos to avoid getting tagged as plagiarism.
- Include attribute selectors when they do not appear in keyword searches. Otherwise, split the page based on that attribute.
- Includes SEO metadata that flags the page as selling a product. For example, adding a currency improves the score in local markets, and the date indicates the offer still applies.
- Make page links sharable. That converts text and social messages into a branded picture and title. Even better is adding the trackers to recognize when people follow shared links.
- Adjusts functionality based on context, such as disabling the buy button when items go out of stock and removing the URL from the Google Search Index when the product gets dropped from inventory.
Listing Widget
A listing widget is a horizontal bar of products with an image and text. Both need to fit into the aspect ratio and thumbnail-sized box. Careful planning makes it possible to automate the entire process of creating the widget, while an ad-hoc approach results in more manual fiddling and testing.The design optimizes the products within each widget to maximize revenue. Each one can have a different goal and comes from a different source. The most sources are:
- Category hierarchy to find products.
- Upselling items the user is viewing.
- Cross-selling with things in the shopping cart.
- Previously purchased consumables.
- Promotions during checkout.
- Demand predictions, such as those tied to the weather.
Catalog Page
A catalog page has many listing widgets per page. Product selection comes from the product hierarchy of the website. Each page should align with SEO keywords and have the content to land organic searches. For many industries, it will be easier to rank a category page than a product details page.Checkout Workflow
The best checkout workflows use psychology to maximize click-through to completion. If completion fails, it maximizes the data collected for abandoned cart recovery. Standard design features are:
- Accelerate data entry with autofill, caching, digital wallets, and links to external authorization services like Facebook and Gmail.
- Remove all distractions from the window.
- Collect contact details up-front.
- Allow the user to change the quantity of any item at any time, including deletion.
- Allow the user to go backward and forward through the checkout flow.
- Add a link from each item in the cart to the underlying product details page.
- Include a link to the terms and conditions.
- Retain the shopping cart between user sessions until the things get purchased.
- Check entered data before progressing to the next window. That includes the credit card expiry date, CVV, and card number.
- Clear the shopping cart if the client's bank suspects a fraudulent purchase.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO ensures the website meets the needs of modern search engines. It enhances organic search ranking by making information about the page more accessible to search bots. Basic SEO processing for an e-commerce website includes:- Google Rich Results for products, including price, part numbers, images, and other details.
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP) data, including page titles, descriptions, and icons for display in search engines.
- Add, merge, and delete URLs.
- Block indexing to test websites and pages not intended to land search results, like payment pages.
- Share links such as those for social media and text messages.
- Cybersecurity like HTTPS
- Page response time
Quality Management
Quality management collects metrics to analyze the user experience and track system performance. It includes details like how long the DNS lookup took and if all the URLs in the page downloaded correctly. That level of detail makes it easier to detect emerging issues before they affect the user and reduces the time to fix problems if they arise. The information includes:- Page load times as experienced by the user.
- Breakdown on the performance of each subsystem. For example, the duration of DNS lookup vs. network connection.
- Response code for each URL on the page, including 3rd party websites.
- Data on the web browser, such as the viewing area and version.
Page Response Time
Page response time strongly correlates to the quality of the website design. Website deign packages designed for the creator of the website suffer in other areas, the easiest to detect is response time. The other quality metrics include:- Agility to meet business needs.
- Compliance with the Payment Card Industry.
- Disaster recovery.
- Hardware and software maintenance.
URL Latency
Our solutions serve static content for static web pages. However, the common practice is treating the website as a development server that reconstructs the same page for each user's request. That massively increases server loading, which slows down the page.The following chart shows the distribution of URL latency across websites.
URL Redirection
URL redirection is when the web server instructs the browser to load a different URL. It is a usability feature for the user. Backlinks, hyperlinks within the website, and the Google Index should never have them. They slow down response times and increase SEO complexity. The following chart shows the impact on the average response time for a given number of redirects.
URL Count Per Page
Most Content Management Systems (CMS) used to build websites generate excessive links. Excessive means the URL that has no material impact on the user experience. The following chart shows the number of CSS files per page across websites. The Google recommendation is to embed CSS into the page and have zero files. That allows the page to start rendering while downloading the first URL. Websites with many have to wait for all of them to finish before drawing the page.Page Shift
Page shift is when rendered content moves after the initial rendering. The longer the page takes to download, the worse the problem becomes. The most common sources are omitting the height and width of images. The other significant source is overriding CSS definitions in one file with another of different sizes. That forces the browser to redraw the page and causes the visual display to jump. Our website designs have zero page shifts.
