Approaching e-Commerce with Best Practices in Mind

The Basics

When you begin to walk down the long road of web development, it is important to always keep your best practices in mind: design, responsiveness, and accessibility.

Design

The design of a website is often the most important feature of a website, “making or breaking” the visitor’s opinion of your products and your brand as a whole. It is important to recognize that the number of people that leave the website after seeing the first page on most e-commerce websites typically hovers around 41% – 55%, this number is referred to as the bounce rate, and it is ideal to move that percentage to 20% – 40% to have an optimal e-commerce store.

Mobile Optimization

Responsiveness

A responsive website is one that can adapt to the size of the window viewing it, and can optimize itself for mobile platforms in order to reach a broad audience. If you’re using WordPress for your e-commerce website, you’re in luck! Almost all WordPress themes are responsive by default. Mobile use is growing more each year, and not it is estimated that 52% of all web traffic is from a smartphone. In order to best accommodate over half of the internet, and to ensure you don’t turn off that group to your products and brand, it is important to keep your web optimization in mind. Here’s how to check if your site is mobile-friendly:
  • (In Chrome) Right-click the website you want to check
  • Click “Inspect”
  • Click the undefined icon
Doing this will allow you to view the site in a simulated mobile format.
Mobile Optimization

Accessibility

Last, but certainly not least, is the accessibility of a website. Ask yourself, “how easy would it be to navigate this website if I was hard of sight? What about hearing? Would I get a similar experience as if I wasn’t?”

These questions are all important considerations to take into account when developing a website, especially one that caters to an audience that has people that are differently-abled in its demographics. There are 2.2 billion people with a visual impairment and 466 million people with a hearing impairment in the world, and it is likely that at least some will visit your website if you are pushing for a large audience.

Accessing and navigating a website and signing up/purchasing services are things most people take for granted; people with disabilities often are locked out of various experiences websites have to offer. Web accessibility regulations seek to help resolve the issue by establishing a baseline level of accessibility guidelines for sites to adhere to.

It is paramount that you keep track of regulations for web accessibility, especially by keeping web accessibility in mind starting at the early phases of development.

To learn more about how to be more compliant, please visit the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for AA compliance.