ESSENTIAL STEPS TO TAKE FOLLOWING A CUSTOM E-COMMERCE WEBSITE LAUNCH 

Launching an e-commerce website for your online business might be a major milestone. Yet, it is only the very first step to take for becoming a prominent e-commerce platform. Your custom e-commerce website is the same as hundreds of other businesses starting online. It needs to be differentiated from the crowd of competitors for your e-commerce brand to make an impact. 

But how can an e-commerce business, or more specifically, an e-commerce website, stand out? This is a question that many business owners seek the answer to as competition keeps growing. Fortunately, there is a specific set of actions one can undertake to ensure their website reaches its full potential. Many of these steps have to do with design, functionality, management, and content, which ultimately contribute to enhancing customer experiences. Business owners can rely on the experience of e-commerce website development services professionals to implement them. Read on to gain some insight into the most essential actions following the launch of your e-commerce portal. 

  

18 Most Important Custom E-commerce Website Design Actions 

• Create an XML sitemap – One of the best things you can do for your website is to create an XML sitemap. This is one of the e-commerce website design fundamentals to improve the chances of Google indexing. All you need to do is install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to generate the XML file and make things easy for the crawlers. 

• Work on your product feeds – E-commerce business owners need to think beyond just their website too if they want to outsell the competition. Create a data feed for your products and offer them to networks like Amazon and Google Shopping. Doing this raises your site’s chances of appearing in the searches. 

• Integrate website with Analytics – Another essential step for e-commerce business owners is setting up Google Analytics. It allows you to keep track of metrics like site visitors, traffic identity, keyword performance, traffic source, and many more. Analytics configuration is essential for any custom e-commerce website. 

• Having website backup measures – Downtime due to server failures or security issues can lead to a severe loss of business. So, one should not delay in installing a backup plugin. It can be configured to take regular backups and protect your business under any unwanted circumstances. 

• Make the website SEO friendly – Optimizing your e-commerce site for better visibility is something you must do. You can consider using integrated SEO plugins like Yoast SEO to understand what steps you can do to improve page quality and visibility. This can help your e-commerce website gain better ranking and traffic 

READ: THE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO ECOMMERCE WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION 

  

• Create social media accounts for your business – Setting up social media accounts for business as important as e-commerce website design and quality content. Most of your target customers are present on social sites now and like finding businesses on their preferred channels. Gaining followers on social channels can boost engagement and conversions. 

• Generate fresh content – E-commerce businesses often tend to suffer due to the lack of fresh, informative and engaging content. It is important to realize that simply listing products is not enough. Fresh content can keep customers interested and help your website stand out. 

• Social promotion is key – Creating accounts across major social channels and doing the occasional posts is not enough. If you want more visibility and conversions for your custom e-commerce website, social media promotional campaigns can work wonders. Do some research into your audience and plan out your social ad campaigns precisely to witness positive results.

• Make permalinks SEO-friendly – Optimizing the permalinks on your e-commerce website pages helps search engines get a clearer idea about them. Permalinks that are automatically generated make no sense from an SEO point of view. So, you should change the permalinks to terms matching or pointing to your post titles. 

• Ramp up the website’s security – Overlooking e-commerce website security is a mistake that can cost you dearly. There is nothing worse than losing a website you have worked so hard to build. Having a firewall, HTTPs and SSL protection can boost the protection against hacking, malicious threats and viruses. 

• Enable Google Search Console (GSC) – Regardless of your e-commerce website design or category, it should have Google Search Console set up. It gives business owners an idea about how their website appears on Google. You can also gain key insights such as websites linking to your website, discover site issues and what keywords it ranks for. 

• Share press releases – Spreading awareness about your e-commerce website is necessary, especially when you are just starting. An amazing way of doing this is creating press releases that explain what your website is about, and what you offer to customers. 

• Make the most of Google Alert Mentions – An ingenious step custom e-commerce website owners can take is utilizing Google Alert Mentions. You should ideally set up alerts for target keywords and your website. Doing so gives you an idea about how people are perceiving your brand, and discover what they are saying online. Business owners also gain awareness of their competitor’s efforts and create custom strategies accordingly. 

• Rely on caching – Caching is another necessary step that must be implemented without a second thought. It ensures that your site loads fast on both desktop and mobile platform devices. Without caching, load times are long and customers can get easily annoyed. Caching can be done with the help of a caching plugin or service. It should be implemented regardless of the size of your website. 

• Offer email sign-up option – Email is still an excellent way of informing customers about products and offers. An email campaign is also a potent method for helping to create relationships with customers, and encouraging them to share their feedback. Lure in your audience and tempt them to sign up for your mailing list. 

Source: Myntra 

• Keep expanding your listed product range – Typically, a new e-commerce website design has a significantly lesser number of products compared to more established ones. This is exactly why business owners should add more products fast. Doing so will make a positive impression on target audiences and can raise trust in your brand. It also produces a positive impact on rankings as you have more optimized online real estate. 

• Network with bloggers and website owners – Networking with website owners and bloggers is a sound strategy to gain more exposure for your e-commerce website. This is not just about generating some backlinks but building mutually beneficial relationships with them. Doing so can lead to greater credibility and recognition for your brand, which can help you surpass competitors. Try to target individuals with a good reputation, and have the aim of eventually gaining shoutouts from them. 

• Obtain multiple high-quality inbound links – Backlinks are a valuable currency for any e-commerce website owner aiming to get higher rankings in the SERPs. Your business should have links pointing towards it, from various quality and relevant websites across the Internet. Your custom e-commerce website needs to build authority this way if it is to achieve higher ranks. 

These are the most crucial e-commerce website actions you need to perform to witness better results. Utilizing them will help you surpass competitors and achieve faster growth. 

  

Key Considerations for E-commerce Website Design 

Creating a high-quality e-commerce website design requires following a set of guidelines. There are some key factors to take into consideration for making your website a success. Take a look at the ones mentioned here: 

• Mobile responsiveness – There is simply no workaround to designing a mobile responsive e-commerce website for your brand. It is no secret that the majority of people now exclusively use their mobile devices for discovering, researching and purchasing products. So, if you don’t have an app yet, your website needs to be mobile responsive at the least. 

• Fast load times – A slow loading website will break your reputation even before you have built one. No matter where people load your site from, it should load up immediately. So, e-commerce business owners should direct developers and designers to create clean code and fluid designs that load fast. 

• Precise call to actions – your custom e-commerce website should have clear call-to-action buttons and links to make purchasing an easier experience. Every category section, product listing page, and check-out page should have visibly prominent CTA elements for the convenience of shoppers. They should not have to work hard to find what they need. 

• Convenient check out – Design your e-commerce website in a way that the check-out process is completely seamless. One of the things you can implement is implementing single page check-out features. You may also want to allow customers and new visitors to check out without having to sign up or log in. Do not have them input information that is not required to make a purchase. 

• Clearly laid out contact info – Contact information for any e-commerce website needs to be laid out prominently. This is because customers can get disgruntled if they fail to find your business’s phone number or email address when needed. You can have the contact information in the form of a nonintrusive popup or as CTA on your pages. The footer and header sections should have your contact info. 

• Social sharing buttons – E-commerce customers now like the ability to share a product they like with their family and friends. So your e-commerce website should contain social sharing buttons for all major platforms. If your customers share products from your platform, the chances of gaining even more customers increase dynamically. Social buttons also make your website look more modern. 

Source: Amazon 

• Design for peak usability – Usability is a key aspect for e-commerce website design and one that impacts the customer experience. So, your website’s design should be centered around offering the best level of usability to visitors and existing customers. Know that it is possible to create good-looking e-commerce sites that offer simple and convenient usability. 

• High definition images – Any image you use on your website needs to be high-definition or of visibly decent quality. This includes the banner images of your home page, product images and any other visual elements you want to use. Low quality or pixelated images can be an instant deal-breaker for most prospective customers. 

  

E-commerce Website Design – Mistakes to Avoid 

Some mistakes have to be avoided when it comes to designing an e-commerce website. Avoiding these can help you create hassle-free experiences for users and keep them coming back. Take a look: 

• Not having a responsive design – If your website does not have a responsive design in 2020, it is going to lose out to its competitors. This is one of the biggest mistakes made by business owners today, and one with immediate negative consequences. 

• Low-quality navigation – The navigation of a website should be intrinsically user-friendly and there is no alternative to this. At no point starting from the moment they visit your e-commerce website should they have to look around for basic options. You can have a sidebar or headers with filtered navigation to make things easier. 

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash 

• Complicated registration page – Registering to an e-commerce website is one of the most important steps. But you should avoid making the process a long one for sure visitors. To start with, your sign up form should only require the username, email, and password of customers. Avoid captchas and other such elements if possible and have social login buttons. 

• Visual elements not aesthetically pleasing – A website should be easy on the eyes of readers as most people are using their mobile devices to browse products. So whatever theme or template you use should be aesthetically pleasing to most people. You do not want to go too unconventional on colors as that may reduce readability. 

• Not having a detailed search option – Offering a more detailed search option for your e-commerce platform is a good idea. You should have an advanced search option to help customers narrow down on the products they need. It will just make things a lot more convenient for them. 

The information given above can help you enhance the design and usability of your e-commerce website. Consult with professionals from a leading e-commerce design company to build your ideal website.