Have you tried looking at your ecommerce site on your phone? Are you able to find your way around or do you just get frustrated and leave? Let’s talk about how to update your site so that your Black Friday/Cyber Monday customers don’t throw up their hands and go to your competition.

Whether we like it or not, more and more people are using devices to access the internet and purchase items. Not only did 66% of all shoppers during the Black Friday weekend last year use a mobile device [1], but CNBC reported that “The Friday after Thanksgiving [in 2018] was … the first day in history to see more than $2 billion in sales stemming from smartphones.” [2] — but if your website isn’t set up to handle that kind of traffic, you’ll miss out on all those sales.

Focusing on Desktop development is outdated
It’s easy to focus solely on optimizing your website for a computer. A tweak here, a tweak there, and you can test it right away and see how it looks. And with responsive themes being the norm, you can relax knowing that your site is automatically adjusting for the smaller mobile screens… right? Wrong!

Responsive themes only solve part of the problem. Ensuring that your customers don’t have to “pinch and zoom” on your site is beneficial, but what about images, videos, large blocks of text, and loading times?

Responsive themes only solve part of the problem.

Think Mobile First!
When developing your ecommerce site, it’s helpful to think about it from a mobile user’s perspective. What would your customer want to see on your site when they access it on their phone or tablet? How can you craft your content so that it meets those needs and makes their purchase super smooth?

If you already have your store and design, consider getting feedback from others about the design of your mobile site. A few adjustments might make a huge difference; but be willing to do a major overhaul on the design if needful.

What would your customer want to see?

Top Three Issues We See
Part of our management services is to monitor mobile speeds and usability. We see the same issues cropping up over and over again. While it’s true that over time certain fixes have to be repeated (think laundry or washing dishes), there are some updates that can be made to minimize these and keep your site running smoothly!

• Text too small to read:
  • Check CSS settings to be sure your viewport is setup correctly and that proper breakpoints are setup for different browser widths.
• Clickable elements too close together:
  • 48dp square minimum, 8dp apart [3]

• Site loading time over 2 seconds: While this is hard to truly optimize for, there are several steps you can take to decrease your load time and retain your impatient customers.
  • Images:
    • Optimize images using next-generation formats such as WebP
    • Explore the benefits of using a lazy load plugin or Amp Plugin
  • Minify JS/CSS
    • Consider concatenating, minifying, and compressing your style sheets and scripts
  • Clean up inactive/abandoned plugins
    • Review your plugins and delete any you’re not using.
    • Any plugins that are not being updated should be replaced due to the security risks

We see the same issues cropping up over and over again

Final Thoughts (2 Bonus Issues!)
In preparation for the holidays, two more major issues that crop up all the time are payments and navigation. Having multiple menus and submenus can deter a potential customer from using your site on the computer — and it’s even worse on a smartphone. Make your products easy to find and don’t require them to tap more than once or twice. As for payments, that’s the whole point, right? You want to make it super easy for your customers to buy, so consider activating mobile payments like Apple Pay, Google Pay,  Amazon Pay, etc.

Want help ensuring your site is ready for the holiday rush? Let us help!

[1] https://infogram.com/1pkrpjw96edw12t97rk7q7m903i3wz9d27k
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/24/black-friday-pulled-in-a-record-6point22-billion-in-online-sales-adobe.html
[3] https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/accessibility/accessible-styles#multi-device_responsive_design

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