What you don’t want to happen
During that 6 minute window of opportunity, they spend their time becoming frustrated and annoyed with your website trying to find what they need, till they reach the point where they abandon the site and search for a faster and better shopping experience with one of your competitors, never to return again.
What you do want to happen
Your website loads fast, and that fast page load speed continues throughout your customers shopping spree as they navigate through your website right through to purchase.
Important Point – A fast website not only contributes to a much higher conversion rate on the customer’s first visit, but is also a massive contributing factor to your customers returning within the next 3-6 months to purchase again.
Scoring a Positive Review
When it comes to eCommerce, everything you do should contribute to creating a raving fan and securing a positive review for your store or product. It’s a fact that people are much more likely to leave a bad review when something goes wrong than they are when something goes right. Everybody hates a slow website, so if you want to increase the chances of scoring a great customer review, you better make sure your website is fast.
So, how do you speed up your website?
Now there are plenty of posts across the internet on the topic of Website Speed Optimisation, so our aim in this resource is to highlight and prioritise the easiest things that you can do, with a focus on websites built using WordPress and WooCommerce.
1. Your product images are too big.
Oversized images are the most common cause of slow loading websites, so sign up for an image optimisation service like Shortpixel. Install their plugin, configure and start optimising the images in your media gallery. But, don’t become too obsessed with image optimisation; you want to find the happy balance between an image that still looks nice and sharp but has a compact file size for faster delivery. Great looking images contribute to a higher conversion rate; blurry, pixilated images do not.
Important Tip – I would suggest generating WEP and AVI versions of your images, which Shortpixil facilitates. WEP and AVI are new types of image formats that will allow you to reduce your image file size to be smaller than that of a JPEG or PNG while still maintaining the quality of the image. Both Chrome and Safari support these modern image formats, which are by far the most common browsers people are using.
2. You are on cheap hosting!
If you have an eCommerce website, you need quality website hosting. Unfortunately, most big-name hosting companies are more interested in squeezing as many websites as possible into a shared hosting environment to make as much money as possible. For eCommerce hosting, you should either be on a dedicated server if you have steady, predictable traffic. Or, if you need the flexibility of scaling up quickly to account for a sudden increase in traffic, Cloud hosting is the right choice for you.A sudden increase in traffic can be caused by one of your products going viral or during a peak buying season like Black Friday, Cyber Monday pre- Christmas etc. With cloud hosting, you can quickly allocate more server resources to handle the increased traffic via a quick phone call to your hosting company.
Important Tip – If you are an Australian based company and need a fast response from your hosting provider, I suggest speaking to the guys at Servers Australia. Their support team is Australian based; they offer 24/7 support and provide various Cloud and dedicated hosting solutions.
3. You’re using an Off the Shelf multiple purpose eCommerce Theme.
If your website was built by an agency that does not specialise in eCommerce, or you built it yourself. Most likely, the website has been built using a multi-purpose eCommerce theme that comes with all the bells and whistles. The problem with this type of theme is that it has been created to appeal to as wide an audience as possible to maximise sales. The result of this (from a coding perspective) is a bloated mess that is extremely hard to optimise and maintain long term; when it comes to performance – less is more. Think of your website as a high-performance race car, every gram of unnecessary weight has been stripped away, leaving just the lightweight parts that are engineered to work together to win the race.You may love the look and feel of your website, so the solution may be that you just need to reach out to an eCommerce Developer to strip down your website and rebuild it without all the extra unnecessary weight slowing it down.
4. Too Many Plugins Installed!
Now, let me firstly state, there is nothing wrong with installing wisely chosen, well-coded plugins to introduce the feature or functionality into your site needed to give it the edge over the competition. But, if you have gone ahead and installed a bunch of plugins, each coded by different developers, each doing a separate task, your website speed and reliability will suffer. If you are reading this resourceful information, you are most likely not a website developer and cannot possibly tell a quality plugin from a bad one. But what you can do is complete a simple plugin audit yourself. Login to the backend of your website, review all the plugins that have been installed and deactivate the ones that are not needed. Then check the site’s functionality is not affected and delete the deactivated plugins. By deleting the unnecessary plugins, 90% of the time, you will have contributed to speeding up your website.
Important Tip – If you find a lot of outdated plugins, either update them or remove them, as outdated plugins pose a significant security risk to your website, making your site more vulnerable to hackers.
5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
By incorporating a CDN, you can significantly reduce your website load time, especially if it is image-heavy like an eCommerce website. In simple terms, the benefit of a CDN is that it will load your website content from the nearest data centre to your customer. So, for example, if you are an Australian based company selling in the USA and a customer from California is shopping on your website, you would want the website loading fast from the nearest data centre in the USA, not from Sydney, Australia.
Important Tip – Choose your CDN wisely, make sure it has data centres in the countries you are targeting and make sure it is a paid service. There are risks with using a free CDNs service, as some countries have internet providers that block free CDNs as it loses them revenue. The two largest Telecommunication companies in Australia are guilty of this, forcing websites to load from overseas data centres without you knowing. But if you are paying for the CDN service, that means the telcos are getting a payment passed on, and your website is much more likely to load from the location-specific data centres as expected.
In conclusion
The five points listed above are items you can largely do yourself. However, beyond this point, further optimisation becomes a highly technical and specialised skill, where you need an experienced developer with solid experience optimising websites, which is where we excel.
If you would like to discuss further how we can assist you in speeding up your website, please feel free to book in a call to discuss further.
Online Shopping is very popular at the moment. Consumers needs have changed and a lot of businesses have had to change the way they do things to survive through the COVID-19 Outbreak. We’re hearing a lot of questions about whether online shopping will continue at the same pace after local lockdowns end and the pandemic is resolved.
We’ve looked at Google Trends and compared some keywords to see what consumers have been looking for over the last 12 months. This helps to show us how people were shopping before and what’s happening now.
Understanding the demand for online shopping can help when considering a custom ecommerce website for reaching new customers.
The trend is really easy to read here. For ‘buy online’ you can see that after the peak brought on by the first wave of restrictions that search traffic has still maintained at a higher level than where it previously sat.
Across Australia people have been looking for things to ‘buy online’ more than ‘buy in store’ consistently over the last 12 months.
A very similar trend on this comparison. Omnichannel retailing has become increasingly more popular in recent years. While both ‘delivery’ and ‘click and collect’ involve visiting a website, delivery allows customers to not have to leave their home. So unsurprisingly delivery has been incredibly popular through the COVID-19 Outbreak.
As with the pervious example, a years worth of data shows that customers have been happily engaging independently with a company’s website for some time now. The interest in delivery seems to be still growing. It’s an opportunity for your store to reach customers wherever they exist.
Search traffic for customers looking for an ‘online sale’ has peaked and dropped over the last 12 months before positively settling in recent months. A small peak of interest for ‘in store’ sales can be seen at Christmas. Comparing this to the traffic for ‘online sale’ seems unfair but it’s relevant.
People looking for sales in stores are seasonal, but the data shows people are nearly always looking for sales online. We think this is a huge indicator for why online shopping will continue at a similar rate after lockdowns are lifted.
The COVID-19 Outbreak can be very stressful for those managing a business. You may be conflicted about whether it is a good time to adapt your business model and expand your digital presence.
Your customers are online, and they aren’t going anywhere, anytime soon.
With all the support available to Victorian businesses it is a great time to invest in an innovative online shopping experience to engage more customers.
Once you’re ready to get started you can contact with us on 03 9043 1039. Alternatively you can fill in the contact form below. We’d love nothing more than to play a small part in helping your business grow online.
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We know from Google Trend analysis that online shopping isn’t going anywhere and it’s more important than ever to be thinking about your online presence. Maybe this is something you’ve been thinking about for a while, but the cost to build a website can be intimidating. Your business and your brand are important, so the investment of time and money in a good quality website should be a key element in your COVID-19 recovery strategy.
The digital experience you give your customer should be at the same level of great service you give your customers face to face.
We’ve done some research to list where you can find different Government grants and programs that could potentially contribute to your budget. Hopefully this can help bring the dream of a beautiful new website a little bit closer to a reality.
As an example, for us here in Niddrie the City of Moonee Valley the local government is offering $10,000 grants for Adapting to Changing Needs.
This includes online innovation, web design and redevelopment, ecommerce platforms, mobile app development. We’re currently working with local businesses who are applying for these grants and taking the opportunity to discover new customers waiting online.
The Victorian Chamber of Commerce has put together an Employer Guide for COVID 19. It is regularly updated and includes changes to the Modern Award. That’s something every Victorian business owner should want to be aware of.
While you won’t get a cash injection reading this guide, it helps prevent legal costs or fines that could take away from any budget you’ve put aside to cover your costs for building a website.
GrantConnect is a portal where you can review a variety of different grants. They come from different states, industries and programs. Each grant covers useful details such as categories, close dates and eligibility criteria.
This is a great place to find any niche grant opportunities you many not have been aware of specific to your industry.
When Victoria went to Stage 3 Restrictions again on the 8th of July the Business Support Fund was extended. What does this mean for you? If you’re already getting JobKeeper there is now another $5,000 grant available you can currently apply for.
One suggested use of this grant is “developing the business through marketing and communications activities”. We can’t think of a better way to achieve this than updating your website to generate new customers.
Leave no stone unturned. The grants and programs portal at Business.gov.au asks you a few questions and then generates a list of grants specific to your business.
While this list is shorter than the one at GrantConnect it is another place to regularly check for resources that may be available to you.
Depending on eligibility grants might not be an option for you. We know the investment of a strategic and stunning web presence will play a key role in how you operate post the COVID-19 outbreak.
That’s why we’ve included the Coronavirus SME Guarantee Scheme. This scheme gives you an opportunity to get an unsecured personal loan that includes an initial 6 month repayment holiday.
Victorian businesses are eligible for various tax relief measures as a result of COVID-19. If you haven’t already lodged your tax for the last year it’s worth reading up on.
You can use your tax return as an opportunity bring in some extra cash. Any extra budget could be put towards the cost of building your website.
We hope you found this list helpful, but we aren’t experts in government stimulus. We’re experts in custom web design. Eligibility criteria, close dates and other relevant information can be found on the linked websites. It’s worth looking into and seeing if there is anything you’re not currently getting that you’re entitled to.
If improving your online services is part of your COVID-19 Recovery Strategy we can help with stunning bespoke web design, development or custom ecommerce solutions.
Once you’re ready to get started you can contact with us on 03 9043 1039. Alternatively you can fill in the contact form below. We’d love to be a part of making your website a beautiful reflection of your business.
If you’re looking to build a new website for your business, custom WordPress development is the way to go.
WordPress is by far the most popular CMS. As of the end of 2018, nearly 1/3 of all websites are built off of WordPress, with WordPress controlling about 60% of the market share. And for good reason.
WordPress is incredibly flexible, open source, and user-friendly—making custom website development easier than many other platforms.
As custom WordPress developers, we’re often asked what makes a customised site better than a template site.
We’re happy to answer. Here are six major reasons why custom WordPress sites lead to superior performance.
While it may seem faster to pick a template website and CMS and simply plug in your own content, custom sites will save you time in the long run.
Why?
Off-the-shelf themes or templates are coded inconsistently from one to the next. Remember: these themes are all built by different developers, each with their own coding styles and preferred structures.
So even with a template site, there can be a high learning curve.
When it comes to making any changes to the theme, whether it’s a HTML structure, CSS markup, or PHP code, you or your developer will have to reverse engineer how the site was built—which can take longer than building an entire site from scratch.
By developing your own custom WordPress site, you are in the driver’s seat. You know how the site is built, so making changes is easy.
One of the biggest advantages of a custom WordPress site is the ability to slim your site down to only the necessities.
Off-the-shelf theme development companies care about one thing only: volume
In order for those companies to be successful, they require a huge number of people to buy their sites. But every individual website user has different needs.
To cater to as many paying customers as possible, these developers cram as many features into these templates as they can. These templated themes come with many page layouts, tons of add-ons, and all kinds of unnecessary bloat—known as “theme bloat”—that you likely won’t ever use.
And, if you ever have to customise the site (which you will some day), you’re just throwing more onto the pile of features.
On the other hand, when you develop your own custom WordPress site, you have complete control over what features go into the site.
That means a slimmed-down, lighter site with only the features you need. Not only does that mean an easier user experience from the backend, it also means less unnecessary code and queries on the website frontend, which means a better experience for your site visitors too.
Which leads us to our next point…
When you’re able to control every line of code on your site, you can be sure that every line of code is being used.
That means your code can be fully optimised to be as streamlined as possible, which means faster load times and a smoother user experience.
With an off-the-shelf template you are at the mercy of the site speed you’re given, with limited ability to optimise.
But their research also shows that 50% of visitors will abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
It’s in Google’s best interest to make sure that they’re only serving up extremely fast websites.
So make sure your site is one of them.
While there are many off-the-shelf templates that provide so-called “SEO benefits,” the reality is that a custom website is always going to have an SEO advantage over a template.
Google’s ultimate goal is to serve up the best websites to its users. If properly designed, a custom site is going to provide a better user experience than a template site—which makes Google happy.
On top of a better front-end experience and faster page load times, custom sites offer a ton of other SEO benefits.
A custom WordPress site will give you greater control over page layouts, the link architecture of your site, the quantity of content you can create, page meta data, and even advanced SEO components like schema markup.
You’ll also have more control over elements like H1, H2, and H3 headings, without being stuck with the default heading tags provided by certain themes.
On top of that, if you ever encounter any SEO issues, you’ll have the ability to get under the hood and fix whatever’s wrong.
With an off-the-shelf template site, more built-in features can mean more security holes. You can’t be certain about the reliability and safety of the system you’re using.
When something does go wrong, you’re also far less likely to have the support available to help you through any issues you encounter.
Investing in a custom site also means investing in a developer who’s going to work with you to make sure your business is protected and that you always have the answers you need.
Ultimately, a custom-developed WordPress site is going to give you and your business the freedom it needs to succeed.
A custom site will give you the freedom to service your customers in the best way possible. Not only will you have the ability to tailor the look and feel of your site to your exact specifications, you’ll also be able to control how that frontend meshes with your backend system—to make sure your business processes aren’t hampered by the need to fit into a predetermined template.
You’ll also have more control over your future, with less reliance on third-party tools that could change or be deprecated at any instant. And when browsers and devices change—because they always will—with a custom site, you’ll be primed to easily adapt to that change.
And should your business ever change (always for the better of course), you will be able to adjust your site to those changes, putting you in the driver’s seat.
At Fox and Lee, we create beautiful and practical solutions. Our Melbourne-based custom WordPress development and design studio can take your business from good to great—with a website that dominates the competition.
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