When creating an online business, a great ecommerce website design is essential since it draws in new customers, offers a positive user experience, and boosts sales. Designing for ecommerce is different from constructing a typical website because it entails promoting products and giving users a seamless purchasing experience.
To advance your online store, we provide the top 10 ecommerce website design best practices.
- Make Your Site Mobile-responsive
A mobile-first approach should be taken while designing an e-commerce website. Your ecommerce website builder must offer mobile-responsive (if not mobile-first) layouts because almost three-fourths of online purchases are made on mobile devices (mcommerce). With no to very little design restrictions, responsive themes appear consistently on all devices (from tablets to smartphones) and provide an excellent on-site experience.
- Keep It Simple
Think like a customer while designing an e-commerce website. Can you quickly or with fewer clicks locate what you need? An excellent e-commerce website makes each component serve a specific purpose and is simple to explore and understand. Maintain a simple, clear, and tidy website design while concentrating on making sales and giving your customers a satisfying shopping experience.
Use white space, a maximum of three colours per page for your website, and easily legible fonts. Create scannable content. To draw attention to important information, use headers and organise the text into short paragraphs, bold type, and bullet points.
- User friendly navigation
The most common motivation for online purchasing is convenience, which is also one of the biggest causes of shopping cart abandonment. A smart e-commerce website design should make it simple for your customers to find the products they want, and this process begins with intuitive and efficient navigation. This often encourages customers to move from exploring to buying in your online business.
All the website components that direct viewers to particular information on your website are referred to as navigational elements. This includes the website footers, on-site search, product filters, and product category pages in the header navigation menu.
- Use High-quality Images
With product images in particular, it’s crucial to highlight high-quality images because they boost conversion rates—up to 40% for 360-degree product photos. Before making a purchase, customers want to view a product from as many perspectives as they can. Building trust and confidence with your customers also comes from offering clear, excellent, and real product images.
Make certain that your photographs are web-optimised. It can take a while for some high-quality photographs to load. Select an e-commerce website builder that automatically optimises and compresses your photographs for web viewing.
When possible, use lifestyle pictures of customers using or engaging with your items. For instance, photographs of clothing items on a model rather than flat on a surface or a mannequin tend to be more enticing.
- Use Colour to Your Advantage
Conversion can be improved by incorporating colour psychology principles into the design of your e-commerce website. Studies suggest that utilising red in CTA buttons, for instance, can raise click-through rates by as much as 34%, which can excite and drive a person to take action.
Key conclusions:
- Pick hues that are in keeping with your branding.
- Utilise website colours that comply with accessibility standards.
- When utilising colour on your website, abide by the 60-30-10 design rule: 60% of the space should be taken up by the dominant colour, 30% by the secondary colour, and 10% by the accent colour.
- Easy & Seamless Checkout Experience
One of the top five causes for shopping cart abandonment is the necessity to create an account, which is followed by unexpected shipping expenses and a difficult checkout process. These all centre on the check-out procedure. Your checkout page layout must be straightforward and user-friendly. Make sure that every aspect of the checkout process is obvious, including the pricing, shipping costs (if applicable), the data you require to complete the transaction, and what to do if a customer needs to make a return or has an issue with their order.
- Display Customer Reviews & Testimonials Strategically
Find ways to show potential customers the ratings and testimonials you’ve received from your existing customers while designing for e-commerce. Use social proof, as we discuss in our post on cross-selling advice, to your advantage since genuine customers’ final purchases are the most persuasive kind of recommendation.
The more trustworthiness you project to website visitors, the more likely it is that they will buy from you. This will ultimately lead to an increase in sales.
- Make it simple for clients to contact you
In addition to streamlining the checkout process and making your website simple to use, you should prioritise making it simple for your customers to contact you. If customers can contact help swiftly if they have any problems, they are more inclined to make a purchase.
- Make a Contact Us page accessible from every page of your website.
- To answer frequent inquiries, provide a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page.
- If you have any social media profiles, link to them.
- Be Consistent With Branding
Your brand serves as a distinctive indicator of who you are and what sets you apart from the competitors. An e-commerce website is an important component of a brand’s identity and should represent the same ideals as your merchandise. Spend some time defining your brand and incorporating it into the layout of your website.
More essential, maintain a consistent brand presence across all of your platforms. The colours and messaging, for instance, should be consistent between your website and your social media pages like Instagram. The tone of your support service should be identical to that of your website, whether that be conversational, informal, official, etc.
- Optimise product pages
Ecommerce websites differ from other websites because of their products. By optimising your product pages, you can keep your products in the spotlight. The majority of the points we made above, such as navigation, social proof, simple checkout, and high-quality photographs, also apply to your product pages.
You must keep in mind that a product page is optimised both for search engine optimization visibility and, more significantly, for converting surfers into customers.
Final Words
Sales are boosted by carefully thought-out e-commerce website designs. This is significant because 42% of users claim to leave websites with poor functionality. Therefore, when creating an e-commerce website, keep your target audience in mind and make it simple for them to make purchases (and for you to close a sale).
