You have your beautiful store through WooCommerce, you have amazing products, so why aren’t you getting the sales you hoped for? It could be as simple as not having your WooCommerce store optimized for your mobile audience.
Use a Responsive Theme
It is estimated that in 2018 there will be over 4 billion mobile users in the world, however, according to Socpub, 57% of mobile users will abandon a website if it is not optimized for a mobile device. A responsive theme means that your site will display a mobile optimized version of your site. Responsive themes will change the layout and content so that it scales down to fit a mobile device or tablet.
Some themes are designed to be responsive, but other themes aren’t as flexible and need a plugin to make them more mobile-friendly. Testing your website on both a desktop and a mobile device allows you to ensure your content is viewable for all users (this also includes various plugins, widgets and theme features). If your theme is not responsive, one of the easiest plugins for theme mobile optimization is the JetPack plugin.
Decrease Loading Speed
Mobile shoppers are shopping on the go and want the experience to be fast. According to Google, 52% of mobile expect greater speed and ease when they are mobile shopping. If your website loading time is greater than 2 seconds, your customers may leave and look elsewhere for their products. Make sure your site is being hosted on a server. Look into getting a VPS or dedicated server instead of using shared hosting. Shared hosting has many sites sharing the same bandwidth (aka – ‘data plan’), which means that there will be times when your site will slow down due to the traffic on other sites that are also on the shared hosting. VPS hosting allows your site to have its own bandwidth, maintaining fast speed and performance.
Another way to minimize your loading speed is to scale down pictures. It’s important to have high-quality images, but because they will only be viewed on desktop or device, it’s important they are only as large as they need to be. Some plugins are also great at optimizing images for mobile use so they load quicker. Consider testing your website on PageSpeed Insights to check the loading time and what can be improved. You’ll most certainly need to use a premium caching plugin which can compress images, leverage browser caching, minify HTML and CSS, and more. You could also consider using a CDN service to help your site load quicker, which is especially important if your WooCommerce shop is international.
Write Short Product Descriptions
Do not use long paragraphs to describe your products. Mobile readers are used to skimming for information, too much information can make them leave and buy from a competitor that has a better mobile-friendly website. Your WooCommerce store will return more sales if you keep product description paragraphs shorter, only 3-4 sentences per paragraph. List unique or important details as bulleted points of the text. Use a drop-down or a ‘click for more details’ link for the detailed, longer descriptions of your products.
Keep Your Menu Clean
Your menu needs to be simple and easy to access. It needs to look good on both your mobile and desktop versions, for this reason, keep your menu to only a few main categories and all other items as sub-categories. Make sure your menu buttons are easy to click. They need to be big enough to tap with fingers without having to zoom in. Most responsive themes already manage this, although you’ve likely visited websites on your phone that you need to zoom into to navigate around which can be annoying. You want to ensure the experience is as pleasant as possible for your visitors.
Focus on Enhancing Your Search Features
According to Google Analytics, visitors will be four times as likely to buy if your website has a good search feature that is optimized for mobile usage. You need to ensure that your customers are finding the products they are looking for with just one search of your site. Use word suggestion, auto-finish and pull-down options in your search function. Two great plugins for search optimization with WooCommerce sites is Recommendation Engine and Enhanced Product Search.
Your Checkout should be Simple
The more information that a customer has to enter at checkout, the more likely they are to abandon your products and go somewhere else. To make checkout smoother, allow guest checkout instead of forcing customers to set up an account. Edit your checkout fields to only ask for pertinent information, one plug-in that will help is the Checkout Field Editor. Also, allowing Samsung/Apple Pay, PayPal or other popular payment gateways will help the checkout process go smoothly and quickly for your customers. Mobile users want to enter as little information as possible, and by having a quick way to pay (and with a trusted gateway), they will enjoy their shopping experience more.
As you can see, it is extremely important that your website is mobile friendly. After all, Google Double Click reports that the average mobile user spends 87 hours on their device, so wouldn’t it be nice if your business was the one converting all those hours into sales?
