A well-built and maintained Magento website is a key factor that contributes to lead generation and sales. When building it, you need to know the basic features of any successful eCommerce store. If you want to build a top-notch website that reflects all of your business requirements without extra hassle, check out Magento development services.
Meanwhile, in this post, we’ll talk about five things you should know when working on the development of your website. Learn how website speed, checkout, and content affect the success of your business.
Table of Contents
Test the website’s speed
The importance of having a fast-performing website cannot be overstated. According to the statistics, 67% of users drop the website if it takes more than three seconds to load. In order to avoid such a problem, here’s what you can do to:
- Reduce the size of high-resolution images. High-quality images are a necessary part of your website, but they should slow down its work. You can integrate specific plugins to fix that problem.
- Use content delivery networks. If you have a lot of content on your website, CDNs store that content on different services around the world, taking the load off your platform.
- Browser caching. You can optimize the performance of your online store by caching and storing the recent web pages on the server. If the users want to access them again, it can be easily loaded.
Check the website’s forms
Lots of eCommerce websites use forms as marketing and sales tools. The data that you get from this form is beyond useful for future research and targeting. After you’ve developed the form, check its functionality and ensure the safety of the data. The customers have to trust your company to leave their personal information, and if it gets leaked, you’ll hardly be able to restore the trust of those users again.
In order to check the forms, set regular testing of all the forms throughout the website, making sure that all the data is properly captured. Additionally, optimize the website in a way that will make it easier for the users to leave their information. Don’t forget to attend to the backend processes that ensure communication with the users who left their information. Your form shouldn’t be too long; cut the unnecessary details that won’t be of any use to you.
Test the checkout process
Checkout is the last step of the user journey but probably the most crucial one. Even though the users made it to the moment they’ve decided to buy your product, it doesn’t mean they’ll go through with that decision if the checkout process is long and complicated.
Think of your online store as a big mall with lots of different stores and departments. Now imagine that you wanna buy one thing really quickly but cannot find it, circling back and forth, unable to find a single consultant. That’s how users feel when they encounter a website with a poorly designed checkout process.
You need to make the checkout process as simple as possible, allowing your users to figure it out by themselves without putting extra effort into it. Enable guest checkout, so the customers don’t need to create an account and allow social sign-ins.
Backup the website’s data
One more thing to look out for is the proper backups of the website’s data. When looking for the backup software for your website, keep in mind that it should be:
- Regularly updated, depending on the amount of information and sales, set the proper time for updating (once a day, a week,etc)
- Complete, capturing all of the information on your website
- Stored on a separate server
- Quick and easy to access when you need it
If something goes wrong, such as a cyberattack or loss of information, you don’t have to worry and let the backup software do its work. Without the backup system, you risk losing all of your previous work completely, losing customers and revenue due to downtime, and losing time and money spent on the recovery.
Update the content regularly
Your online store is a living and breathing creature in terms of the Internet. Whenever you make the smallest update, it affects how your website interacts with visitors, customers, and search engines. A static website that isn’t updated or no new content appears on it; the search engines will rank it lower, considering it a dead website.
Besides providing relevant and high-quality content to your customers, you’ll be able to ensure long-term loyalty. The customers will keep returning to your website; if not to buy products, then to read the latest articles. And returning traffic will bring enormous value to your online business. You can also add some graphics or visuals to make the content more entertaining and engaging.
With each update, you also get the chance to be ranked higher on Google. This search engine is constantly looking for new and topical content and adds them to the indexer.
Conclusion
And that’s it. Building and launching a Magento website is just the first step in leading a successful eCommerce business. Yet if you set things right from the start, it’ll take minimum time, costs, and efforts to maintain it in the future.
Don’t be afraid to invest lots of time and money into testing at the beginning; it’ll save your resources in the long run. Test your website’s speed and how fast it performs, test all the forms, and checkout process, etc. In this way, you’ll be able to understand how regular users interact with your content and store.
Things will be much easier with a reliable Magento development partner, so consider finding yourself one.
