6 Proven Methods To Turbo-Charge Your Website Performance

The UK’s e-commerce industry is set to experience a £5.3 billion boost during 2020 due to the increase in online shopping during the pandemic. In a year where consumers have been forced to stay at home, savvy retailers have responded by experimenting with new online sales channels. This is predicted to have a significant long-term impact on the buying behaviour of customers beyond the Covid-19 era. For Devon-based businesses who want to capitalise from this lean towards e-commerce, it’s time to up your game and follow these tips to turbo-charge your website performance.

1. Boost Your Site Speed

Today’s online shoppers have never been so fickle. If your site pages take too long to load, your visitors will get bored and click away to a quicker platform. But how long is too long? The latest research suggests that 40% of digital consumers would click away from your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Amazon calculates that if their site took just one second longer to load, then they would lose a whopping $1.6 billion in sales every year! If you want the sales to pour in, then it’s time to optimise your website for speed, which should also help it to rank well with Google too.

2. Optimise Your Call-To-Action Buttons

What is the purpose of encouraging visitors to click on your website? Is it to encourage visitors to fill in a contact form, place an order, or perhaps provide their email address to sign up for a newsletter? Whatever your focus, you’ll need to place large call-to-action buttons strategically on your web pages which will tempt your visitors to click and complete your goals. These should use bright colours to grab the attention of the visitor and be positioned carefully on the page for maximum impact. Think about the words you use within your call-to-action buttons too. You might create a sense of urgency by adding ‘now’ as in ‘Sign up now’ to your command. Or else, you can use the first person to appeal directly to the reader. Unbounce noted a 90% conversion increase when switching a CTA from ‘Start your free trial’ to ‘Start my free trial’.

3. Commit To Content Creation

If you’re invested in SEO, (the practice of helping your site rank well within the listings of a search engine) then you’ll need to commit to regular content creation. CMS websites are built with the option to publish static or product pages that act as a brochure for your site, alongside blog or content sections that can be regularly updated by your company. If your e-commerce sales figures aren’t achieving the levels you’re hoping for, then blogging can make the difference. Not only are regular blogs and articles a fantastic way to gain social exposure, but they can also help to attract longtail keyword searches. When putting together your content, it’s important to focus on providing solutions for your consumers. What questions are they asking that you can supply the answer to? These should form the bulk of your posts.

4. Upselling Your Products or Services

Targeting the most appropriate leads and encouraging them to visit your website can be quite a battle. Make it worth your while once they arrive on your pages by tempting them with appropriate products and services. For example, you might have a web visitor that is about to purchase a pair of football boots from your online store. Use this as a great opportunity to upsell and offer them the option to add a boot bag to their order too. This handy e-commerce sales strategy can be implemented at multiple points throughout the sales funnel. You can choose to introduce product recommendations on the product page, during checkout, or even after an order has been placed.

5. Offer An AI-Powered Search Experience

When visitors click on your landing pages, you’ll want them to quickly access the product, service or information that they’re looking for so that they don’t leave your site and look elsewhere. To improve the bounce rate of your site, and enhance the user experience, you must provide an AI-powered search box. Machine learning provides predictive text features to anticipate what your visitor might be looking for. An intelligent search button should take misspellings and synonyms into account to hold the attention of your visitor and get them matched up with whatever they’re seeking.

6. Utilise Responsive Website Design

It’s been a long time since web browsing took place solely from desktop browsers. In 2020, you’ll need to test your website design across a wide range of devices, operating systems and browsers before you launch. To perform well with the search engines, and provide you with a stream of new customers, the Devon-based web design agency Logo+ uses responsive website design to accommodate visitors using smartphones, tablets, and desktops too. This will help to boost user experience and result in more leads and sales.