https://pixabay.com/photos/laptop-business-man-from-above-2838918
If you have an e-commerce business, Magento is a great platform. However, you must take the right steps to provide a positive user experience. Magento stores that succeed with high conversions deliver intuitive and seamless shopping journeys that promote visitor loyalty.
Without taking the steps to properly design a positive user experience, customers may lose interest if they struggle to find their way around, have issues with page loading, or encounter other obstacles. This can cause you to miss opportunities, resulting in less revenue.
Instead, you should aim to transform your Magento store to increase growth along with customer satisfaction and retention. You need to stand out among your competition, and when your store is user-friendly, visitors will stay longer, browse more products, trust your company, complete purchases rather than leave them in the cart, and tell others about your store.
Here is a quick guide to the best practices for improving the user experience for Magento stores.
Optimize the Speed and Performance of Your Magento Store Page
Pages that load too slowly will hurt your chances of getting conversions. Magento is great in many ways, though it requires optimization to prevent a slower load time. Thankfully, you can improve loading speed by enabling caching to reduce load times.
Get exclusive access to all things tech-savvy, and be the first to receive
the latest updates directly in your inbox.
Another trick to increase the performance of a page is to optimize product images by compressing them through Adobe Photoshop and other tools. You may want to consider upgrading your hosting with something designed for Magento stores and using a CDN (content delivery network) like Cloudflare to deliver content more quickly. Taking these actions will create a smoother experience for your users and make conversions more likely.
SImplify Navigation
The way you have your store structured should be optimized for better navigation. When users try to shop in your Magento store, can they find what they need with ease? If not, you’re potentially driving away sales.
To allow better navigation, establish clear categories and organize your products logically. If you have a large catalog of items, creating a mega menu can further simplify things while also providing subcategories for customer selections. You should also consider enabling Magento’s search autocomplete feature, which makes suggestions and has filters, allowing users to browse more easily.
Update Your Mobile Responsiveness Capabilities
The majority of today’s online shoppers use their mobile devices, and if your Magento e-commerce site isn’t mobile optimized, you’ll be missing major opportunities. Some ways you can achieve this are by checking to make sure your theme adjusts to a variety of screen sizes, includes touch-friendly buttons and links that users can tap without having to zoom, and making checkout streamlined.
Don’t Forget About Optimizing Checkout
Speaking of your checkout process, if it’s complicated, users will abandon their carts. One of the best things you can do is provide a guest checkout. Many people are turned off by being forced to create an account, and by providing them with the option to create an account or proceed as a guest, you’ll avoid this issue.
Simplify the checkout process for guests and those with accounts alike. Magento has a one-page checkout that makes it easy. You should also allow multiple payment options through PayPal, Apple Pay, and others while displaying progress made during this process. Users will be much more inclined to continue with their purchases when you simplify the entire process.
Add Personalization for Users
An excellent, not to mention simple, way to improve the user experience in Magento e-commerce is to personalize it by tailoring the content and products that are relevant to them. Magento has an AI-powered product recommendation setting that can display related products as well as items that may be used in tandem with their current purchase.
You can also craft dynamic content through banners, messages, and promotions that are specific to each user’s purchase history and browsing behavior. Geo-targeting is another way to localize the content and currency and shipping options.
Establish Trust by Being Credible and Transparent
Users will continue to use your Magento store if they believe it is credible. Building trust is imperative in creating the best user experience. Doing so requires highlighting customer reviews and ratings on your product pages to show verified purchases and feedback.
Additionally, adding security badges and displaying them will ensure shoppers feel safe when they input their data. Your policies should be clear as well, detailing how you handle returns and refunds and your shipping policies. Transparency is the key to building confidence in any brand, and this will translate into more sales.
Integrate Social Platforms into Your Store
Use social media to your advantage by integrating the appropriate channels that align with your objectives. This will help you engage your target audience, generate valuable leads and increase your traffic.
Along with taking these other steps to improve the user experience, social media integration helps open up direct channels between your brand and your customers while giving you powerful data that can be used to further your product development and other strategies.
It can also help you create the right media strategy that will grow your audience, deepen relationships with customers, and increase your Magento store’s credibility. You’ll build brand recognition, strengthen user engagement, and build a loyal customer base for your brand. Magento has social media extensions that you can use to enhance your site and functionality to make this process a breeze.
Know How to Leverage Your Analytics for Improvements
Taking the steps mentioned above is essential to improve the user experience. However, enacting all of them does not mean you can simply sit back and assume you are finished. Improvements should be an ongoing process. You need to regularly analyze user behavior to discover pain points and address them as part of a constant evolution.
Look at the bounce rate, which tells you if users are coming to your Magento store but leaving without doing anything else. Your cart abandonment rate can alert you to issues during the checkout process, while heat maps can pinpoint where your users click and scroll, telling you more about usability issues on your page.
Get on the Compliance Bandwagon
Of all the best practices you should engage in for improving user experience in Magento e-commerce, one of the most important ones is abiding by compliance. Magento accessibility is key for allowing an inclusive experience for all users.
Traditional webpages may use text size, colors, or images that may make experiencing it difficult for those with visual impairments. Not only are you leaving behind a huge segment of the market, but there are also concerns of violating federal laws that could lead to harsh penalties. Ensuring compliance through the right tools will help you provide readable fonts, highlighted links, text-to-speech reading, and make navigation simple and accessible for everyone.
Why Do Websites Need to Be Accessible?
Compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA and American with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title III is imperative, or you could face several problems. Compliance requires following technical standards to make all web content accessible to anyone with disabilities.
You may not intend to exclude anyone, but not being aware of the requirements can lead to financial penalties as high as $75,000 even for a first violation. You may face legal action, destroy your reputation, and lose business opportunities. What you might not realize is that it doesn’t matter if you didn’t know you weren’t compliant. The metrics change and when new requirements are issued, you need to adjust your Magento site immediately.
Using the right tools can help keep your site updated without costly compliance issues. It will certainly save you from being sued for not having an accessible business. Paying fines and facing lawsuits is difficult, but the blowback from failing to comply can hit your reputation hard. The negative publicity that will abound could impact the future of your e-commerce venture.
If you want to improve the user experience, consider users who could potentially find it inaccessible. This sector of the population is huge, and making sure you abide by the laws to include them will open the doors to good publicity, not to mention more revenue.
Who Enforces Accessibility on Websites?
There is a task force by the DOJ that enforces these guidelines and oversees complaints to determine if there has been a violation. If violations are found, penalties are issued to those who are non-compliant. It’s best to take a proactive approach to make sure you have an accessible website, which improves the Magento user experience for all.
Look for tools that allow you to add accessibility features while seamlessly integrating across all kinds of devices. The additions should allow for grayscale, adjustments of brightness and contrast, inverting colors, and other tools that help all visitors shop with ease, regardless of their disabilities. It’s a win-win to improve the quality of your site and avoid any compliance issues.
