How to Design an Ecommerce Website
Nowadays, if you have a business, you need to be online.
But you don’t just need an ecommerce website. You instead need a high-quality, well-designed, and functional ecommerce website that engages users and helps them convert into paying customers.
Good design is at the core of an effective ecommerce website.
Here are seven tips on how to design an ecommerce website.
- Simple, User-Friendly Design
It is easy to lose yourself and create a complex website with lots of different colours, complicated navigation systems, and mega menus.
A simpler, more intuitive design has its own charm and can, in fact, also help you with engagement and conversion rates.
You want to keep your website simple and focused on the main elements as much as possible — especially for an ecommerce website. The more elements a page has, the more they are competing with each other to grab the visitor’s attention. That’s not good.
You want website visitors to only focus on the most important thing on your page — the gateway that leads them further down the sales funnel. Anything else is a distraction and, therefore, must be avoided.
- The Importance of Branding
There was a time when having an ecommerce website was a novelty. That is not the case anymore.
There are countless ecommerce stores out there — and not all of them offer premium quality or customer service. That’s why people prefer buying from established and well-reputed stores, instead of faceless ecommerce websites.
The first step towards building that esteemed credibility is to focus on your brand.
A good ecommerce website design reflects your brand everywhere. From the logo to the colour scheme to the selection of the right fonts: it should be everywhere.
Make branding a priority when designing an ecommerce website, so you can reap its rewards later.
- High-Quality but Compressed Images
Choosing high-quality images for an ecommerce website is extremely important. It not only helps improve the engagement rate on your website, but it may also help tremendously with credibility and conversion rates. According to a study, high-quality images can affect conversion rates by up to 40 percent. Therefore, make sure to only use high-quality and high-res images on your website.
However, at the same time, make sure that these images are compressed and not too big in size, as very large images can affect the loading speed and search engine rankings of your website. Ideally, you should not use images that are bigger than 300 KB. You can ask your designers to losslessly compress images or use plugins such as Smush or EWWW Image optimizer to compress the images you use on your site.
- An Easy and Intuitive Navigation System
Once you have created the right website architecture, it is time to make sure that your website visitors can easily find each page.
This can be done with an intuitive and functional main menu, a smartly designed footer section, a clean website design, a search bar, a custom 404 page that helps visitors find the relevant page instead of jumping ship, and widgets such as related posts and items that people can browse.
Intelligent use of categories and tags can also help improve the website navigation system. The litmus test for you should be, “Can a first-time website visitor find any page they want easily and within 3-4 clicks?” The answer should be yes.
- Built for Conversions
Ultimately, the goal of every website should be a high conversion rate. This is especially true for ecommerce websites. Therefore, the ecommerce website should be created with conversions in mind and its core.
The foundation should be built with the right sales funnel. From sales pages to informative content, everything should help push the visitors further into the sales funnel.
The landing pages should be designed according to the best practices. This includes strategic use of images, main heading, subheadings, bullet points, CTA, customer testimonials, social proof, etc.
Additionally, you should always conduct A/B tests for further improvements and higher conversion rates.
- Fast Loading Speed
A slow-loading website directly affects the conversion rate. According to a study, roughly 38 percent of website visitors quit a page if it takes more than five seconds to load.
Additionally, 70 percent of online buyers say that the loading speed of websites affects their purchasing decision, which directly translates into a 7-percent drop in conversion after a one-second delay.
- Mobile Friendly
Last but not least, your ecommerce website has to be mobile-friendly and responsive.
Mobile is now officially overtaking desktop in overall traffic. Furthermore, Google also now prioritises mobile devices with a mobile-first search index.
So, if your website is not mobile-friendly, you will not only lose search engine rankings on mobile and desktop, but you will also miss out on the majority of traffic and conversions.
Conclusion
Designing an ecommerce website can be a challenge. However, it can become less overwhelming if you know what to do and how to get it right.
The above-mentioned seven tips are the ones you can’t compromise on.
Good luck!