The holiday shopping season is in full swing, and if you’re looking to boost your eCommerce sales over this busy time of year, it’s essential that you have an optimized website ready for customers. Nexcess predicts a 15.5% increase in holiday shopping sales this year, which means eCommerce companies need to act now to prepare for the influx of possible sales they might expect this year. Maintaining a fully optimized and functional site for your customers is essential for taking advantage of the shopping season. Here are a few ways to optimize your store in anticipation of the holiday season.
Improving Your Website Speed
Website speed is essential for a variety of reasons. It’s a significant factor in customer satisfaction and conversions, as well as something that can impact your ranking on search engines. Optimizing your site speed should be one of your top priorities to improve your eCommerce store’s performance. If you run your store off of WordPress, the most popular CMS in the world, you may utilize several different plugins for your web pages. While plugins like WooCommerce allow you to build beautiful and functional online stores, these plugins can sometimes slow down your processing power and deliver slower load times. Because of this, it’s essential to keep your WordPress infrastructure and plugins up-to-date and optimized. With managed WordPress hosting, you can benefit from a team of professionals who automatically update plugins for you and test them regularly to ensure they are not slowing down your site.
Implementing On-Site Search
Search is a powerful tool for any eCommerce store, but it’s essential during the holiday shopping season. It helps customers find the products they want, and it can help customers find the information they need. Search can be integrated with other features like product recommendations and wish lists.
Not only is on-site search important, but your SEO is also essential for attracting new customers online. In addition to search engine optimization, there are several other ways to optimize your eCommerce site. For example, consider using Google Tag Manager, which allows you to easily add tracking codes and other analytics tools to your website. It would be best if you also looked into implementing sitemaps, which help search engines index your entire website more easily.
Optimizing the Checkout Page
To optimize the checkout page, make sure you have a secure checkout. You can do this using SSL, which provides an extra layer of protection for your customer’s information and ensures that their credit card data is encrypted. Another way to add trustworthiness to your site is by displaying a Trust Seal icon at the bottom of your payment gateway. This gives customers a visual cue that they are on a safe website and makes them feel more comfortable sharing their personal information with you.
Optimizing Your Mobile Site
As the shopping season approaches, you must understand your customers and how they interact with your site. Most online shopping is done through smartphones, so mobile compatibility is essential for keeping your store accessible and successful.
The good news is that optimizing your mobile site is relatively simple! First, you must ensure that your website’s content is readable on any device—ensuring that each page has been formatted adequately for different screen sizes. You also want to ensure that people can easily navigate your site using their smartphones or tablets—making sure there aren’t any links or buttons too small to click while still being legible and noticeable on the mobile screen. If you’re unsure how to optimize your site for mobile devices, you may benefit from the help of a managed WordPress host like Nexcess. Nexcess can offer you access to WordPress professionals 24/7 who can help you optimize your site for mobile and troubleshoot when there are any technical issues.
Consider the Benefits of WooCommerce Hosting
If you’re using WooCommerce to power your eCommerce site, consider the benefits of hosting with a company specializing in optimizing WordPress sites for performance. With proper hosting and caching, your store could rank higher on Google search results and get more traffic from search engines. This means more qualified customers coming through the door—and potentially more sales!
WooCommerce is a popular open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress that makes it easy to build powerful online stores without having to write any code. That said, there’s no doubt that some of its potential shortcomings can be exacerbated by poor hosting choices. Finding a reliable WooCommerce managed hosting service can seriously benefit your online store.
With a managed WooCommerce host like Nexcess, you can benefit from “free migrations, staging site, automatic daily backups, unlimited email accounts, and a 30-day money-back guarantee included in every plan.” The professionals at Nexcess can help you get your online store where it needs to be for the busy holiday season and beyond. The hosts update your site plugins and CMS infrastructure and monitor your site to ensure continuous uptime and high speed so you don’t have to worry about your digital infrastructure. Managed hosting services can give you back the time you need to focus on your business and developing your product or service.
When it comes to the holiday shopping season, ensuring your site is up-to-date and fully optimized is essential for retaining customers and landing those extra holiday sales to boost your end-of-year bottom line. Consider the benefits of hosting for your WordPress site, and start taking advantage of your eCommerce site’s full functionality and power today.
