wordcamp / WooCommerce UX Best Practice For Ecommerce Websites

WooCommerce UX Best Practice For Ecommerce Websites

Andy Thorne
woo commerce example

When you’re selling online, it isn’t enough to rely on your products to bring in sales. It is essential to create a good User Experience (UX) to bring customers to your site and keep them on it. Keep reading for our top tips, tools and plugins to improve your WooCommerce UX best practice.

Optimise your page speed for better WooCommerce UX

Over 25% of users will leave if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Not only is page load time important when it comes to improving SEO value, and increasing conversions but it is also vital to ensure a great User Experience for your customers.

This element is crucial, especially for shoppers aged 18-24 who find slow website loading times even more frustrating than other customer segments.

According to a Kissmetrics survey, more than a quarter of users will leave if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Luckily, WP Rocket is here to help. Optimise your WooCommerce site with the most powerful caching plugin to speed up page load time, increase conversions and improve SEO rankings.

Use variation swatches to showcase your product variations

Show a clear overview of all the product variations you offer to improve the user experience for your customers.

Customers like to be able to view and compare the variations of your products, whether it’s colour, size, material or something else. Using variation swatches helps your customer understand, immediately as they enter the page, the available options for the product they are viewing.

Drop-down, text based menus make it difficult to do this, but you can create a more usable and captivating interface with Yith WooCommerce Color and Variation Swatches. Showing a clear overview of all the product variations you offer and improving the purchase experience for your customers.

WooCommerce UX best practice includes using user-friendly search bars

Search bars are one of the most frequently used design elements on content-heavy websites with an average of 3 in 5 customers using them during their visit to your site. Therefore, it is vital that you make them accessible to customers at all times to provide them with the fastest route to the content they are looking for.

It’s crucial that your search bar offers a positive and helpful experience to your customers; offer popular suggestions whilst they are typing, highlight products that are in promotions and allow searches within specific categories. The Yith Ajax Search plugin offers all of this and much more, making it simple and quick to find products.

Live chat can make users more likely to make a purchase

Users are 3 times more likely to make a purchase when you have a Live Chat function on your site. Image from www.gorgias.com

Another way to improve User Experience is through Live Chat. As more and more companies offer Live Chat on their website, more and more users come to expect it. What’s more, customers are 3 times more likely to make a purchase when they’ve used live chat.

Gorgias is a great tool for offering support to customers through a variety of methods including live chat, text messaging and social media. Set up automated support to automate and close tickets, giving your support team more time to help customers.

Social proof is a valuable persuasion method for Woocommerce UX

In the world of eCommerce, where you can’t experience products in real life, many consumers turn to customer reviews for honest feedback and opinions. 84% of customers trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation.

Gathering reviews is a great way to increase the chance of selling your products, with one study suggesting that products with reviews are 270% more likely to sell than those without.

Feefo offers a plugin that allows businesses to improve their brand reputation, build strong customer relationships and improve their customers overall experience. You can gather more detailed reviews by giving customers the opportunity to include images and/or videos, and therefore increase customer confidence.

Reviews also give your customers a platform where their voices can be heard, and in response, you can improve your products and services.

Conducting user research takes the guesswork out of Woocommerce UX

Conduct valuable research by studying your customers behaviour and make improvements to your site based on solid research. Image from www.hotjar.com

Customers’ needs change constantly, and ignoring them isn’t an option; 89% of customers would stop doing business with an ecommerce site that doesn’t understand who they are, making it essential for you to update your site to meet their needs.

UX should never be based on guesswork and assumptions. Instead, conduct valuable research by studying your customers behaviour and make improvements to your site based on solid research.

Hotjar makes it easy to do this by taking recordings of user behaviour on your site. You can view the journey’s they take through your site, establish areas they explore more and those that they skim over. Whilst data and numbers can provide you with some of the information, Hotjar shows you what your customers are doing, and you can identify patterns in behaviour.

Have you implemented any of these tools and plugins yet? If you want some more advice, or you’re interested in implementing some or all of them on your WooCommerce site, get in touch with the team at Factory Pattern today.