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Have you ever wondered, “How easy is it to use my website?”
It is natural to think using your website is super easy. This is because you can use it yourself. But, you are an expert at using your website. You either built it yourself or had it built and you had plenty of time to play with it. Your perception of your website’s usability might therefore be biased. Your typical visitor will visit your site once in their lifetime. Unless they understand how to use your website right away, they will just bounce somewhere else. No one wants to waste their time and energy to bypass a hurdle that should not exist in the first place. As an example let’s think of product filtering.
Filtering
If your ecommerce website sells LED lamps, they can be divided by base type, input voltage, colour temperature, reflector shape and more. Every visitor that comes to your website is looking for a specific combination of those categories. They can’t change it to anything else, they need to find a specific item. When there is no filtering, they are forced to look at every single item that is broguht up by search results. This is hard work, just like it was before the internet.
With filtering, all they have to do is simply checkmark the qualities they are looking for. That narrows the product database to a couple of products, which all meet specified criteria. The work that is left is simply choosing the brand or range of an LED lamp and this is often decided arbitrarily, by budget. So, while implementing filtering can be a difficult task (often requiring editing every single product listing), it saves tonnes of effort to your visitors. And this will show in your conversion and bounce rates. Spare your customers the work and they will appreciate it.
CLS
Have you ever loaded a website and decided to click an element on it, just to find out, while you already commited to click, another element of the website loaded, moved your target down and you clicked the wrong thing! It happens to all of us. As a matter of fact this is so common, it already has a name – Cumulative Layout Shift – CLS. It’s one of those things that can make browsing a website very frustrating. In extreme cases you might even place an order, which you never meant to, just by misclicking. As a matter of fact CLS is such a pain, that Google uses this factor in their Core Web Vitals metric. That means, noticable CLS will decrease your search engine rankings!
Accesibility
Imagine trying to navigate a website, but you can’t read the text clearly due to poor color contrast, or you’re unable to access certain features because you rely on keyboard navigation. This is a daily reality for many users with disabilities facing poor website accessibility. It encompasses various challenges like missing alt text for images, inadequate keyboard navigation, insufficient contrast, and lack of support for screen readers. Experiencing these barriers can be incredibly frustrating and limiting. In severe cases, it may completely prevent someone from accessing information or services online. What’s more, poor accessibility doesn’t just affect individuals with disabilities; it can also impact search engine rankings, as search engines increasingly favor websites that are accessible to a broader audience. Therefore, ensuring good accessibility is not just a matter of inclusivity and legal compliance; it’s also essential for reaching a wider user base and improving your website’s overall performance.
General idea
Of course there are many other customer journey hurdles. Best strategy is to find and remove as many as you can. No website will ever be perfect. but flaws, just like your strengths, compound.
Thi really boils down to a one-off coding job. Setting the machine to do the best possible thing. And when you set things right, they work right.
And when everything works right, people feel as good as they can while browsing your website. And when they do, the buying process depends on your product and price. Do you see what I’m saying here?
Benefits
The flip-side of what I said is, when your store is not comfortable for the user, you loose that user and any potential business he had.
Ecomerce is a game of numbers. You know how many orders you get out of every 100 users. What if this number could be 5% higher, by implemnting a simple style change, that takes an hour of work?
1 hour of work can give you 5% better results. Isn’t that amazing? It is and that is the power of scaling things with software.
Easy way
Talk to us, if you want to find and fix all the little hurdles your website has. This will translate into more orders per day. And it will pave the way for other upgrades, which will imprve the bottom line further. Do not let the compounding effect of flaws slowly kill off your online sales.