Manor Quarry Blog

General Site Analysis

As well as looking at, and optimising the search on your site, and making your site as user friendly as possible, there are a few other aspects to look at when ensuring your web site meets all your customers’ needs, and is as effective as possible.

When analysing your own web site, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What else is there that you feel needs to change or be improved to help them have a better, and hassle-free time on your site, and so ultimately, for you, make more sales. Here are a few more suggestions to look at when optimising your site:

1. Page loading time

Try and ensure this is as quick as possible. Internet shoppers are impatient. If they cannot easily find what they are looking for, or are left waiting for a page to load, they will move elsewhere. Remember, having Flash objects on a page dramatically slows down the page load time.

2. Page content

As mentioned in the previous post (Friendly User Experience), make content relevant to the specific section of the web site you are in. Include links within the text to similar related material that you believe the visitor will find useful.

3. Product information

If you have an ecommerce site with lists of products, try and make the pages as interesting as possible. Include images of the product, a small description with a more info or more detail link to a specific page for that product. Make the image, heading (which should include keywords for the product so customers’ can identify with them even if they do not understand the product name) and other prominent parts of the product listing a link to the product page. Include a ‘buy now’ or ‘add to basket’ button, to make life for the customer as easy as possible, should they wish to purchase it without going into more detail. Most importantly, include the price because when a customer is scanning down a results page this and the product title are generally take into account first. The specific product page should include everything the customer would need to know about the item: more images, more detailed description, product info/spec/technical info, customer reviews, customers who bought this also bought.

4. Bestsellers

Promote specific products at certain times of the year. For example, at Christmas have some seasonal offers for Christmas presents. Make these prominent on your homepage, to encourage customers to click, and then buy. If you have old stock that you want to clear, do likewise. Have a ‘clearance’ or ‘special offers’ section to help sell the rest of the stock. Having a promotional banner linking to a space or area on your site can help get specific products into the customers’ eye level that they may not necessarily have seen.

5. Checkout process

How easy is it to actually purchase a product, and move through the checkout process? If there are a too many steps, too many forms to submit or is too complicated, the customer may get bored or confused and leave your site, abandoning their basket. Do everything you can to avoid this by making the process as simply and pain-free as possible, which should lead to increased sales.

6. Abandoned baskets

A customer has found something they want, they have added it to their basket, but don’t purchase it. Why is this? Using tracking functionality, monitor how many abandoned baskets you are getting and observe which products were in the baskets when they were abandoned. Then work backwards to try and find out why this is so. It could be down to the above point of having an overly complicated checkout process. It could be because of a slow load time for a certain page. Track down the issue and make the relevant changes/alterations to reduce the number of abandoned baskets, and therefore increase sales.