WooCommerce: 6 Tips to Improve User Experience

With the right approach to user experience you can make your WooCommerce website more effective at converting visitors into customers and encouraging existing users to come back to make purchases more regularly.

There are several ways to enhance UX using WooCommerce as a foundation, so here are just a few of the most impactful options available to you.

1. Speed up page load times

At this point it should go without saying that UX will suffer if your shopping site does not load quickly, since most users will be browsing from mobiles and there is a very low tolerance for sluggish performance amongst web-savvy consumers. This is one of many emerging ecommerce trends to stay on top of if your conversion rates are not where you think they should be.

Compression can help significantly with unsatisfactory load times, and you should apply it both to data-intensive elements like product images and to the CSS of whatever WooCommerce theme you are harnessing.

Of course all the backend optimisation in the world will be fruitless if your site does not have a high quality hosting provider to back it up, so be prepared to pay more for a better quality of package if page load speed is not up to scratch.

2. Test the interface

Unless you actively investigate whether or not your site’s interface is satisfying the needs and expectations of visitors, you might be haemorrhaging sales entirely unnecessarily.

UX testing is the perfect antidote to this and there are plenty of platforms out there designed to make this straightforward, whether your site is just about to launch or it is already an established player in its niche. If you do not have the ability to make significant improvements to UX in-house, it is worth working with agencies that offer user experience design services to help you achieve your aims on the basis of testing results.

3. Integrate live chat for instant on-site support

No matter how well designed your shopping site, there will be times when visitors need to get help and they will be unlikely to want to wait around for a response to an email sent to your customer support team.

This is where adding a live chat function can be a real boon, since it means that you can offer support directly to visitors on the site itself, so that they do not need to twiddle their thumbs until a response is offered and can instead get their problem fixed in real time.

There are a number of live chat plugins for WooCommerce, many of which offer additional functionalities such as integration with popular business email and social networking services.

4. Embrace responsive design

As already discussed, you can safely assume that most of the people who land on your site will be using a smartphone or tablet to do their web browsing. That means you need to make sure that your product pages and interface display correctly regardless of the size of the screen or the amount of horsepower that the user’s device has available.

Using a responsive theme from one of the many thousands available is a good way to go about this, although this is just the first step to truly responsive web design in a mobile-first age. You also need to make sure that you populate your pages in such a way that they will not put off mobile users.

For example, over-stuffing pages with too much written content, including excessive product descriptions which obfuscate the most important details in a wall of text, can really make the UX worse for those using portable devices. A combination of responsive underpinnings with a sparing approach to on-page content will work wonders.

5. Make search a priority

You are far more likely to keep visitors on your site for longer if they can easily search for other products once they have satisfied their curiosity with their first click. This is where a good product search plugin comes into play, and once again WooCommerce supports a variety of interesting options in this regard.

Live Search, for example, is a good feature to include, since it lets users get product suggestions while they are in the middle of entering their query. This makes navigating between different product pages more seamless and intuitive. The more time and effort you put into making your site’s search tools well optimised, the better the results will be.

6. Add feedback features

Modern consumers not only want to be able to leave their opinions on products and services on the e-commerce sites they use, but also want to see what other people think of items before they buy.

The majority of consumers trust user reviews to help guide their buying decisions and so you need to cater to this trend by making sure your WooCommerce site lets visitors leave feedback for others to read.

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Rodolfo Melogli

Business Bloomer Founder

Author, WooCommerce expert and WordCamp speaker, Rodolfo has worked as an independent WooCommerce freelancer since 2011. His goal is to help entrepreneurs and developers overcome their WooCommerce nightmares. Rodolfo loves travelling, chasing tennis & soccer balls and, of course, wood fired oven pizza. Follow @rmelogli

4 thoughts on “WooCommerce: 6 Tips to Improve User Experience

  1. Great article. Can you give your suggestions on the TIDIO plugin for live chat?

    1. I don’t know TIDIO, sorry

  2. Hi, Rodolfo, speaking about life chat – which live chat plugins for WooCommerce do YOU prefer? The native FB chat plugin for Messenger is terrible…

    1. Hey Agata! Usually tawk.to is a good one

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