With the proliferation of eCommerce businesses, it can be hard to stand out and keep customers on your product pages. For mobile pages especially, UX expectations runs high. Any flaws in the page and a viewer will bounce. Page loading too slow? Bounce. Font too small or unreadable? Bounce. You get the drift. With over half of website views on average today occurring on mobile devices, how well mobile traffic converts can make or break an eCommerce business. With this in mind, here are four ways to optimize eCommerce product pages for mobile conversions.
Page Load Speed
This is the most important factor. You can have the best site in the world, and if it loads too slowly no one will stay long enough to read (and hopefully buy) on the page. A one-second increase in load time decreased conversions by 70% in a groundbreaking online retail performance report from 2017. Before making any changes to content, product images, etc. ensure that your page is loading quickly on mobile and if it’s not then optimize for that.
The best tool to measure and fix page load speed issues is Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool. Since the whole point of improving load speed is to improve the experience for users who came to your site from Google, it’s recommended to use their proprietary tool rather than a third-party one. Some of the recommendations can be quite technical, so consider hiring a developer for a contract project if your score is anything below 75 for mobile.
One development trick that can improve page load speed is called “lazy load.” This loads different elements of the page in an asynchronous fashion, rather than all-at-once as is standard. By only fully loading images and content that the user sees first, it increases the efficiency of the site and improves page load speed.
Font Sizing
This sounds incredibly obvious, but ensure that the font on every mobile page is large enough to be easily read. It’s amazing how many eCommerce sites use a terribly small font on mobile which decreases conversions. Often web developers are young and forget that the viewer of the page may be from an older demographic without the same visual quality. It’s always best to err on the side of caution with font sizing — slightly too large font is vastly better than slightly too small.
The most crucial product page element where font sizing comes into play is with the price. If it’s not instantly readable, page viewers will bounce. Price font on mobile should be at least as large as the rest of the page, if not larger.
For eCommerce business owners using platforms like Shopify that leverage responsive design, ensure that the font is readable on every single device. You can use developer tools on a desktop browser window to view the page on various tablet and mobile device sizes. Sometimes responsive design ends up causing errors on one or two of the different devices, which will need to be resolved by a competent programmer.
Important Content Above the Fold
The term “above the fold” comes from pre-Internet days when information above the folded portion of the newspaper was considered the most important (and widely read). The term holds for mobile design — content that is viewable without scrolling will be viewed significantly more than anything below. This means that your main product image, product title, price, and call-to-action button should be above the fold if possible.
If mobile page viewers have to scroll to access important information, a certain percentage will drop off and bounce from the site. Even if the site is beautifully designed and optimized for page load speed, a small number of users will bounce. Since optimizing for conversions indirectly means optimizing for bounce rate, it’s crucial to reduce any obvious areas like this that cause increases in bounce rate. Sometimes page design needs to be sacrificed for user experience.
Block Under-Performing and Fraudulent Sub-Publishers
Obviously blocking the (on average) 30% fraudulent traffic for iOS and Android is going to increase your genuine user base and conversions. However, one added bonus optimization feature of the Intercepts and fraud prevention tool is the ability to block under-performing sub-publishers. This is control at a very granular level. If you have a sub-publisher than does not convert – block. If you have a sub-publisher that delivers a high level of fraudulent conversions – block. If you have a sub-publisher that delivers high CPI, but low LTV installs – block.
Final Thoughts on Optimizing eCommerce Mobile Sites for Conversion
Making these three changes to your mobile pages should increase conversions significantly. The great thing is that these changes are free, and easily completed by a competent developer. eCommerce business owners using platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce can get tech support from the platforms themselves to help institute these changes. It’s in their best interest that your site converts well since high-performing sites means more revenue for the respective platforms.
Making these three changes to your mobile pages should increase conversions significantly. The great thing is that these changes are free, and easily completed by a competent developer. eCommerce business owners using platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce can get tech support from the platforms themselves to help institute these changes. It’s in their best interest that your site converts well since high-performing sites means more revenue for the respective platforms.
If you’d like to be confident in your marketing data and budget, whilst simultaneously optimizing your clean traffic, book a free trial with one of our friend consultants. They’ll take you step-by-step, how to use our dashboard and show you how to grow your business whilst protecting against ad fraud.
Guest Author: Calloway Cook is the Founder of Illuminate Labs, an herbal supplements eCommerce business.
