An optimized site can help to draw more business your way, whereas if you haven’t optimized, it can push that business to your competitors.

While creating an optimal customer experience is important for your website as a whole, the checkout page is a key area where most ecommerce businesses could use improvement. Cart abandonment is a very common consequence of less-than optimal checkouts, with an average abandonment rate close to 70%.

Your mission is to prevent cart abandonment as much as you possibly can, and instead encourage people to complete the checkout. Here are some tips for doing just that:

What does it mean to optimize your checkout?

The overarching goal of optimizing your checkout is to improve conversion rates, or the number of visits that result in a sale. Optimization can be looked at as removing or mitigating any roadblocks in the checkout process for the customer.

Some common optimization tasks include: minimizing distractions; helping to gain trust; reducing steps; and driving customers toward purchase. Every website will have its own set of priorities or key areas to optimize. 

Checkout optimization matters because most ecommerce merchants could stand to benefit from fewer abandoned carts. According to Baymard Institute, 17% of abandoned carts happen because the checkout process is too long or complex, while other top reasons such as having to create an account or surprise costs in the checkout could be mitigated by making some changes.

Key checkout metrics to improve

It’s important to know what you’re looking for and how you’re going to measure success. Here are some key metrics to keep track of:

• Cart abandonment rate. This is the percentage of visitors who add items to the shopping cart, but click away before completing checkout.
  
• Conversion rate. This is the number of people who made a purchase compared to the number who visited your website, expressed as a percentage. It is calculated by dividing the number of purchases by the number of sessions, then multiplying by 100.
  
• Average order value. This is the average amount customers spend at one time in your online store. While this isn’t always impacted specifically by checkout optimization, it can be (we’ll touch on some ways).
  
• Returning customer rate. This is the number of customers out of your total who have made a repeat purchase from your store. The checkout process is one aspect of many that can either encourage or discourage repeat business. 

Keep an eye on key checkout metrics so you can see if your optimization efforts have made a difference #woocommercecheckout
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Optimization tips

One of our first tips is that the default checkout process offered by your ecommerce platform (including WooCommerce), is not optimized for the best customer experience. There are flaws with most default checkouts, including things like extra form fields, confusing layouts and forced account creation.

Which leads to our second tip: there are often optimized checkouts that have been built for your particular ecommerce platform if you don’t want to spend a whole lot of time on customizations yourself. CheckoutWC does this for WooCommerce checkouts. 

If you want to go down the route of customizing yourself, or if you want a checklist of sorts for determining an optimized checkout solution, here are some key optimization tips:

Show checkout progress

You’ve probably had an experience online where you’ve wondered how much longer a particular task was going to take and whether you can be bothered finishing it. Various tests have shown a positive correlation between showing the customer their checkout progress and the number of completed checkouts.

A progress bar or similar helps to show shoppers the steps they need to complete checkout and how far along they are. It helps to set expectations rather than keep your customers guessing.

Never force account creation

Forced account creation comes in as the second-most common reason for cart abandonment. This happens when the customer is required to create an account just to complete checkout. In brief; just don’t do it. You can offer account sign-in for customers who would like it, but besides that, leave account creation until after checkout. Even better, if you use the details the customer already provided during checkout to create an account with one click, this makes it more likely they’ll decide to do it.

Be upfront about costs

Surprise costs are the number one reason people abandon the cart. This often comes down to shipping costs or other fees that are added during checkout. Large numbers of people will click away when they didn’t expect to pay that cost, even if it is a relatively minor shipping charge.

The best way to avoid surprising people is to be upfront. If you offer free shipping, tell people how they can get it. Otherwise, give people an idea of the cost – for example, “$8 flat rate shipping on all orders.”

Reduce distractions

Distractions at checkout include things like alternative navigation or complex menus. Customers can become confused or distracted, then abandon the cart. It’s better to reduce anything that has a customer click to a different area of your website.

Reduce form fields

Each new form field that a customer is required to fill out is a potential reason for them to leave. As a general rule, less is more. Only ask for exactly what you need so that you reduce the amount of time a customer has to spend on the checkout process.

Look at checkout flow

Checkout flow is a term to describe the order of operations of your checkout. The aim should be to make it as logical as possible for the customer and avoid confusion. Some checkouts have a strange flow, for example putting the billing address ahead of the shipping address. That’s not how customers generally expect to find it.

Make the cart easy to edit

Difficulty editing the cart can be another issue that falls under “checkout complexity.” Many customers are in the habit of browsing sites and adding items they are interested in to the cart. They then go back through the cart and want to be able to delete or edit as necessary. If you make this difficult, they’re likely to give up. 

Remember, a customer is not going to checkout unless they’re happy with the items in their cart so there’s no point in making it difficult to edit. The customer will more than likely look for an alternative option to order if your site puts up roadblocks.

Be upfront with your returns policy

Another reason customers give for abandoning the cart is that the returns policy either wasn’t satisfactory or wasn’t clear. You can help avoid this by having upfront links to your returns policy. Some retailers have the policy pop up as an overlay on screen if the customer clicks on it. This way, they haven’t left the cart but they still get to see the policy clearly.

Introduce cross-sells and/or upsells

Remember that average order value metric? Cross-sells or upsells offered during the checkout process (or right after) can be a great way to increase your average order value. At the same time, when done right these can offer value to the customer. For example, if they’re checking out an item that usually works with another product, you could offer that product as a cross-sell. Most people appreciate getting all the things they need in one order rather than discovering later that they needed that other product!

How to optimize your WooCommerce checkout

For all the WooCommerce store owners out there, the default checkout is not an optimal setup for your customers. The flow isn’t intuitive and there are too many form fields, among other issues.

CheckoutWC offers you a solution with our plugin that brings the best features of the Shopify checkout and makes them available on WooCommerce. Our solution reduces steps and form fields, and presents the customer with a beautiful, optimized checkout flow.

Ready to check it out? You can sign up for a free 7 day trial here.

The post How Do I Optimize My Checkout Page? appeared first on CheckoutWC.

It’s not just our roads that tend to be busy, but our websites too, as shoppers race to beat deadlines for holidays or holiday shipping. Add the typical sales that pepper the holiday season into the mix and you have the potential for huge surges in traffic.

You can get in ahead of the busy season right now by taking steps to ensure that your website is optimized to handle it. Here’s how and why:

Why optimize for the holidays?

When was the last time you checked on the overall health of your website? Just like humans, websites need regular checkups to make sure they’re operating in prime condition. Many businesses have made the unfortunate discovery that something on their website was not up to par only when their Black Friday sale was plagued with bugs, or worse, their site went down during the busiest period of the year.

Your site should be optimized for traffic at all times of the year, but it becomes more urgent when you lose lucrative holiday sales! Doing the maintenance work early can help you to avoid situations like:

• Buggy features that aren’t working properly for customers.
• A website that’s not working well on mobile (or desktop).
• A slow-running website.
• Website outages.

All of those things impact the customer experience and can result in lost sales for your business. Getting ahead of them is important!

What should you check for optimization?

Here are a few things that are important to check for WooCommerce websites:

Evaluate your current state

The best place to start is by understanding where your store stands right now. Start by asking some important questions:

• Am I running the most current versions of WooCommerce and WordPress? If not, how long ago were they updated? If it has been a while, you may want to work with a developer to make sure you don’t “break” anything with an update.
• Are my plugins, theme and any extensions up-to-date? Again, being far behind in versions can lead to problems when you update, but also, they’ll need updating to work with bug or security fixes.
• Are all of my plugins and extensions still operational? Excess plugins and extensions can slow a website down. Also, if you have any plugins that are no longer supported, it’s best to get rid of them or find an alternative for the function they were performing.

If you do all of this early enough, you may be able to use a staging site to test out any changes before going live. It’s always better to use a testing environment rather than discovering issues when customers are using your website.

Run speed tests

Website speed tests help you to identify whether your load speeds could be faster. This is important because slow page speed gives a poor customer experience, meaning they will leave without purchasing. Additionally, page speed impacts your SEO – a slow page speed will push you down the SERPs.

You can use testing software such as Pingdom, WebPageTest or Web Speed Test to test out your website. These will give you a report and show you where you might be slowed down.

If your website is slow, some common culprits include:

• Themes, plugins or extensions that aren’t up-to-date or are of poor quality.
• Large image files that take a long time to load. If you have any, replace them with optimized images in an appropriate file format.
• Poor quality website hosting. You should have a host that specializes in WordPress/WooCommerce websites and maintains reliable servers.
• Lack of website caching which makes the server work too hard. Caching is easy to set up with a reliable plugin such as WP Super Cache.

Create seasonal landing and product pages

Are you running seasonal sales or stocking seasonal products? Having seasonally appropriate product and landing pages can help put the suggestion into the minds of customers that they should purchase for the holidays.

Do any of this work early and in your staging site so that you can check it for optimization.

Check your product pages and descriptions

Are your product pages and descriptions complete? Do they give the customer all of the information they might ask for when deciding whether to buy? Are you using SEO keywords in your descriptions to help with search?

You should also make sure that you have product images for everything, preferably with different views. Products without an image tend not to sell well – people want to see them! Now is the time to have more pictures taken if they’re needed.

All product pages and descriptions should be complete and optimized for busy season
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Go through the customer experience from start to finish

Now is a great time to see for yourself what customers experience on your website. Start from wherever they would usually land first (most often the home page). Check to see that customers can easily navigate your website and conduct searches for products. Do menus make sense? Is there a logical hierarchy? Does the search function turn up accurate results?

Follow the pathway the customer would take adding things to the cart – if they’re taken to the cart as they add, is it easy for them to click “continue shopping” to get back out of the cart? Is adding or removing items from the cart easy? Can they already see how much shipping is going to cost them? (A common reason for abandoned carts!).

Check your WooCommerce checkout

If you’re running the default, “out-of-the-box” WooCommerce checkout, we can tell you now that it’s not well-optimized for conversions. So here, step one is to do better than the default checkout!

WooCommerce checkout optimization should smooth out the process for customers. Instead of one long, tedious form, you need a multi-step checkout that shows them their progress. You should cut out any unnecessary form fields and pare it down to the basics of what you need. Where possible, add automated field population and offer express checkout options.

This may be a good time to bring in a WooCommerce checkout solution that has already been optimized. CheckoutWC offers a slick customer experience that helps to reduce abandoned carts and customer frustration. You can get a seven day free trial here.

It’s a good idea to go through the whole checkout process (or get a third party to do it for you) to check for any sticking points that may prevent people from completing the checkout. Now’s the time to fix any issues and make checking out an easy decision!

Have a backup plan

If your website is hosted by a third party, part of their service should be running website back-ups for you, so that your site can be restored if there are any issues. If you self-host, you’ll need to run backups yourself. There are several plugins to help with this.

Most of the time, daily back-ups are fine, but if you have a particularly busy WooCommerce store, you may want hourly backups during busy holidays so that you don’t lose an entire day’s worth of sales if anything goes wrong.

While you’re at it, if you have third-party hosting, check to make sure their backups are suitable for ecommerce. They should include store order and payment information.

Final thoughts

Doing some optimization work early on your WooCommerce website can help to ensure it remains stable over busy holiday periods and minimizes any risk of down time. This also helps to keep customers continuing on through checkout!

While you should always aim to keep your store optimized, working on any issues that impact speed or customer experience should start at least a month before holidays. Give yourself plenty of time to take action, especially if it will take more than a little work!

The post How to Optimize Your WooCommerce Website for Holiday Traffic appeared first on CheckoutWC.