Optimizing Ecommerce Homepage
Video Transcript: Optimizing Ecommerce Homepage
Today we are talking about optimizing the home page. You’re going to learn about some of the pitfalls you might run into when designing and optimizing the home page, some considerations for content that you’re wanting to place on this page, and elements to optimize and test.
When it comes to the home page, research, especially from Baymard, has shown quite a few issues among some of the top sites online. 51% are using overly aggressive and distracting ads on the home page. Not even necessarily actual ads, but things that look like ads, like promotions for sales and content like that. 28% of sites use carousels incorrectly, that can mean they are hard to navigate through for visitors. They could be distracting and moving too quickly. And the last thing is that 43% of sites don’t style their clickable interface effectively. That means it’s hard to understand what items are clickable and which aren’t. You might go to click a product and realize you can only click on the product name and not the image to go to a product page. These are some things to pay attention to.
When it comes to content considerations, you want to make sure that things that are on mobile and desktop are the same. Don’t show something on desktop and not show it on mobile. This really applies to a lot of pages, but often the home page can have promotions or sales banners, things that are designed for desktop and then squished down on mobile and are hard to see. Make sure you make mobile elements when you’re designing things like that. Consider sales and promotions, which ones to promote. Also think about personalizing content. For visitors returning to the home page, they might be looking for new items. Try to show them things related to stuff they have looked at or purchased in the past, show them recently viewed items. And then you also want to consider talking about the company. If you’re a smaller company and you’re not as well known in the market, include some information about who you are, why you got started, why you’re different than the competition.
When it comes to the home page, I’m going to go through a few slides of different examples of things to consider adding to your home page and testing. In this case, unique selling points. We have some examples here of different brands that are doing this quite well. They’re pointing out what makes them different, what makes them worth purchasing from. Social proof, this is going to be important, especially if this is the first time customers are seeing your site. They want to know other people are purchasing, other people are having a good experience, why they like your products, and hopefully to convince other visitors to want to purchase. This can include testimonials from influencers in your space, other customers. It could also be from publications as well. Next is a strong value proposition. This can be hard to do and to get right the first time. Definitely A/B test this to see what messaging works best. These are some examples to help give you an idea of what you might want to think of when you’re developing your value proposition.
And next up, we have products. It’s important to showcase the breadth of your product catalog and the different items you have. Visitors might go to the home page and only see one category of your products and think that’s all that you sell. Make sure you are showcasing a variety of different items. And here we are talking about category breadth. Same with products. You want to show a good variety of the categories that you offer. If, for instance, this company, Feat, if they only showed hoodies on the site, you might assume they only sell hoodies, but if they’re also showing these category sections, then you know they also have other items if you’re not interested in a hoodie.
And that’s it for the home page. Hopefully you got some ideas. Go back through the video. Pause on some of the slides. Look at how some of these brands are implementing things on the home page. And run some A/B tests on your site. And I’ll see you in the next video. Thanks.