John, Author at Wooassist

How to Increase Mobile Conversion Rates for Your WooCommerce Store

January 21, 2020 By John Leave a Comment

Over the last few years, optimizing for mobile devices has become increasingly more important. More and more users browse the internet using their phone. According to Statista, 52.2 percent of web traffic comes from mobile phones and it has only been increasing from the previous years. As a WooCommerce store owner, you must optimize your website for conversion on these smaller screen sizes. Learn how to increase mobile conversion rates for your WooCommerce store by following the tips below.

How to Increase Mobile Conversion Rates for Your WooCommerce Store

How to Optimize Your WooCommerce Store for Mobile Devices

Use a Responsive Theme

All modern themes are now built to be responsive. A responsive theme adjusts to various screen sizes. You can check with your theme developer if your theme is responsive. You can also do a quick test by going to your WooCommerce store and then try scaling down the size of your browser. If you see the elements on your website move to adjust to the smaller window, then you are using a responsive theme. If you find that your theme is not responsive, don’t worry. You can switch to a responsive theme. We can recommend Storefront and the Genesis framework.

Storefront was made by the same developers that developed WooCommerce. It is built specifically for WooCommerce so you can expect full compatibility with WooCommerce and official WooCommerce plugins.

Genesis, on the other hand, is a framework. You need to use a Genesis child theme with the Genesis framework. Genesis is well-maintained, responsive and compatible with WooCommerce.

User Test Your Mobile Site

Open your WooCommerce store on your smartphone and do some user testing. Perform actions that you expect your customers to do on your WooCommerce store. Important elements to test are:

making a purchase
subscribing to your newsletter
sending a message using your contact form
filling out the checkout fields
updating your shopping cart
commenting on blog posts
tapping on call-to-action buttons

There may be more that you need to test that is specific to your website. Take note of any difficulties that you encounter and get them fixed. Should you need help fixing any issues, the Wooassist team can help.

Use White Space and Large Fonts

Don’t skimp on using white space on your mobile site. Use it to your advantage. Since mobile devices have small screens, it makes it hard for the user to navigate or read your site if the elements are too close together. Also, make sure your site is easy to read by increasing font size.

Optimize Your Checkout Page

Your checkout page is one of the most important pages on your website. Limit your checkout form fields to only the necessary details. Remove any distractions to completing checkout. Make sure that the form fields are tall enough that they are easy to tap and fill out. Make the checkout button large enough so it is easy to tap. Don’t make the checkout process a burden to your customers.

Remove AutoPlay Videos and Pop-ups

Pop-ups and autoplay videos are annoying for desktop sites. Even more so on a mobile site. Don’t burden your customers with extra data charges from autoplay media. In some cases, these elements may be necessary. But if they don’t help you increase your sales, consider removing them. Instead, focus on making your customers click on your call-to-action buttons.

Improve Your Site Speed

Site speed has become very important as it is now a ranking factor for SEO. On the mobile platform, site speed is critical with mobile data speeds being slower than a wired internet connection. If your mobile site takes too long to load, the user will just leave. There are a lot of tools at your disposal to determine how you can improve your site speed. Google PageSpeed Insights even shows recommendations specific to your mobile site. Other tools that we can recommend are GTmetrix and Pingdom Website Speed Test.

Optimize Your Images

This is related to site speed but deserves its own section. Many WooCommerce store owners neglect optimizing images and just upload willy nilly. If you upload large images without optimizing them, your mobile conversion rates would take a hit. You can use a plugin to optimize the images you’ve already uploaded. However, if you’ve uploaded images that have dimensions bigger than the image placeholders, they will need to be manually optimized. If you’ve been doing this for years, then you’ve got a big task ahead of you. To manually optimize images, you can follow the instructions in this blog post.

Optimize Your Site Navigation on Mobile

Poor navigation can make or break a mobile website. Make sure that your mobile website is easy to navigate otherwise your customers will leave your site out of frustration. Use a hamburger menu. If you are using a responsive theme, the hamburger menu should be built in. If not, you can custom code your mobile menu or use a plugin.

Offer Multiple Payment Gateways

It is important to offer the payment gateway that your customers prefer. On the mobile platform especially, depending on your location, mobile wallets are a thing. If you can tap into that market, you can improve your conversion rate. For iPhone users, there’s Apple Pay which you can enable on WooCommerce.

Just follow all the tips above to increase your mobile site’s conversion rates. If you have any tips that you can add or any questions at all, let us know in the comments.

8 Ways to Create Blog Content for Your WooCommerce Store

January 15, 2020 By John Leave a Comment

Why You Should Have a Blog?

If you do not have a blog on your WooCommerce store, you should consider creating one. Having a blog is a good way to generate leads, get more traffic and build you brand. It can also become a good channel for providing good customer service. WordPress was created initially as a blogging platform so you should take advantage of it’s powerful blogging features – create blog content for your WooCommerce store.

Things to Consider Before Writing Your Content

Before you dive in and start creating blog posts, there are a few things that you should consider such as creating a content marketing plan. Even if you already have a blog, it is still a good idea to do this if you haven’t done it the first time. A content marketing plan can help you align your content with your goals.

Content Marketing Plan

A good content marketing plan has two important parts: (1) defining your goal and (2) defining your audience. For defining your goal, ask yourself what you want to achieve using the content that you create.

For defining your audience, you can create one or more customer personas. You can be as specific as you want and you can even give your customer persona a name. Everyone involved in your content marketing should be familiar with your customer persona.

Hubspot has a great post on how you can create your own content marketing plan.

How to Come Up With Content Ideas

Now that you have a plan, you need to get ideas on what content to create.

1. Check What Your Competitors are Writing About

A good first strategy is to spy on your competitors. Find out what content they are writing about and improve on what they have.

2. Tutorials, Guides, and How-To Articles

You can create tutorials, guides and how-to articles on topics relevant to your niche or products. For these kinds of articles, it is important that the content helps address or fix a problem that your audience is having.

3. User Generated Content: Interviews, Guest Blogs

This one doesn’t require as much effort. You can reach out to influencers and other notable personalities in your industry and ask if they are willing to do an interview. Do remember that your interview must also be interesting to your audience. If it doesn’t resonate with your audience, it is not likely that your interview post will help achieve your goal. You can even coax influencers to write an article for you.

4. Internal Documents

Sometimes your internal documents can make for good content. If you have specific processes in place and you have an internal document that details this, you can convert this into in a blog post. You can just leave out the parts that cannot be revealed to the public. Do an audit of the resources you have to determine what documents you can use.

5. Reviews

If you use products in your niche, you can do a review post. You can position yourself as an expert in your niche when you do your review. You can even compare several products that do the same thing as a means to help your audience decide which product is a better fit for their needs.

6. Listicles

The internet is abound with listicles. Heck, this post is a listicle. A listicle comes from the root words “list” and “article”. From there, you can deduce that it is an article that contains a list. Many people like to read listicles because they are clear and direct. The reader clicks a listicle because he/she is interested to know what the article lists. You know you click on listicles every now and then and that is a testament to how effective listicles are.

7. Company Events or Other Company News

If you have any upcoming or recently-concluded company events, you can write about it on your WooCommerce store’s blog. It’d give your audience a chance to connect with you. You can also leverage this as a networking opportunity.

You can also write about any news in your company that your audience might be interested in such as having a new member on your team, a move to a new office, or opening a new branch.

8. Research Work, Do a Survey and Discuss the Results

This one requires a bit more effort. Doing your own research or hosting a survey and then publishing the result on your blog can make for some good original content. If you take the extra mile on your research work, you can even leverage it as a link building opportunity. Imagine linking your study from a high-authority site like Wikipedia or some researcher catching wind of your study netting you a link from a high-authority “.edu” site. Google loves those.

9. Cornerstone Content

Cornerstone content should be the core articles on your blog. It should be detailed and well-researched. Cornerstone content should tell your readers everything they need to know about a certain topic in 2,000 words or more. Cornerstone content is great for SEO. Make sure you link it to different articles across your blog. Several links to external reputable sources will also help. Use keywords relevant to your niche but never over-optimize.

Depending on your niche, there will be other opportunities for creating great content that resonate with your customer persona. It is up to you to figure out what that kind of content will work for you.

If you have other ideas for creating great content for your WooCommerce store, let us know in the comments.

How to Recover Abandoned Carts in WooCommerce?

November 30, 2019 By John Leave a Comment

It’s not uncommon for ecommerce shoppers to abandon carts. You may not know it, but your store might also be suffering from carts being abandoned. This problem can be addressed however. To start, you must determine why your customers abandon their carts.

Why online shoppers abandon carts and what you can do about it?

There are various reasons why online shoppers abandon their carts. We lay out the most common ones and what you can do to address them.

Checkout is Too Complicated

Your customers will nitpick and that is to be expected. When you make your customers jump hoops during checkout, you’re not doing them a favor. Your checkout should be quick and straightforward. If you must add some other stuff that will complicate checkout, consider if you can add it on the thank you page instead. The thank you page is the page where the customer is redirected to after making a successful purchase. If you need help tweaking your thank you page, the Wooassist team can help.

Users Need to Create an Account to Check Out

Internet users are already burned out having to create an account for each internet service that they use. Don’t add to that burden. Don’t force your customers to create an account if it’s not necessary. To enable guest checkouts on WooCommerce, go to your WordPress Dashboard, click on WooCommerce > Settings. Under the Account and Privacy tab, enable “Allow customers to place orders without an account”. You can tweak other account related settings here to your liking.

Too Many Checkout Form Fields

The default WooCommerce checkout page is good enough as it is. There is no need to add more fields unless necessary. If you’ve edited your checkout page before to add some unnecessary fields, look into it and consider removing it.

Unexpected Charges

Customers will abandon your checkout when they see the shipping fee. No one will force you to offer free shipping if it will make your business unsustainable. There are however some things that you can do to reduce abandoned carts as a result of shipping and other fees. People now are more accepting of shipping fees. For other fees, be transparent from the get-go. If you charge taxes, handling fees, and other fees, make it clear starting from the product page that you charge these fees. If they are suddenly greeted by these fees on checkout, it will look like unscrupulous practice.

Too Many Clicks to Checkout

Reducing cart abandonment is all about simplifying your product purchase process. Ideally, it should not take more than three clicks for a customer to check out. If it takes four clicks to check out, that is one click too many. Get rid of unnecessary barriers to completing checkout.

Don’t Make it Hard to Contact You

Some of your prospective customers will look for your contact details before they make a purchase. If they added a product to their cart but could not find your contact information or even a contact us page, there is a high likelihood that that user will abandon that cart. To prevent this from happening, make sure you have a contact us page. Even better, if you can add your email or phone number on your WooCommerce store’s header.

Payment Issues

Another common reason for abandoning shopping carts is payment issue. When the customer tries to pay for his/her order and it fails, you can bet that cart will be abandoned. The solution here is simple. Offer more than one mode of payment. Some common payment channels you can use are Paypal, Stripe, Authorize.net, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, and Square.

Other Things You Can Do to Reduce Cart Abandonment

Show Security Certificates

To be able to sell your products or services online, you’ll need to be able to establish that you are trustworthy. You can show security certificates and security seals on your checkout page to improve your trust rating. Some security seals that you can add to your site as Norton, McAfee and TRUSTe.

Offer Free Shipping

Free shipping can significantly reduce your cart abandonment rates. However, not every business can make a profit when offering free shipping. As an alternative, you can offer free shipping when your customers meets a required minimum order value or quantity. This strategy can also help improve your average order value.

Offer a Money-Back Guarantee

Most consumer laws dictate that you should have a return policy anyway. So there’s no reason not to do it. Making your money-back guarantee known shows your prospective customers that you have faith in the quality of your product or service. Don’t worry about the people that might abuse your money-back guarantee. It hardly ever happens. And if it happens a lot, the problem might be your product.

Improve Your Page Load Speeds

If your site is slow, some of your prospective customers might get frustrated and abandon their carts. Make sure your site is fast.

How to Recover Abandoned Carts

There are many ways to recover abandoned carts. Some of the more common methods are remarketing and abandoned cart emails.

Using Remarketing to Recover Abandoned Carts

There are many platforms that you can use for remarketing. Essentially, remarketing works by saving a cookie on the user’s browser so you can show them your tailored ads. Neil Patel details how you can use remarking on Adwords to recover abandoned carts. Facebook is another platform that you can use for remarketing. SproutSocial details how to use remarketing on Facebook.

Using Abandoned Cart Emails to Recover Abandoned Carts

Abandoned cart emails send your customers a reminder email if they did not complete their purchase. For guest checkouts, this requires that the user must at least have entered his/her email address. This won’t be an issue if you require your customers to register before making a purchase. Do note however that requiring customers to create an account may hurt your conversion rates. There are a lot of abandoned cart email plugins that work for WooCommerce, you just have to find the plugin that works for your needs.

Recover abandoned carts and improve your sales by implementing these strategies. If you have any questions, you can post a comment below. If you need help setting up abandoned cart emails or anything else, you can send us email.

How to Save Time and Money When Outsourcing a WooCommerce Developer

June 21, 2019 By John Leave a Comment

How much is your time worth? Do you usually spend a couple of hours trying to fix an issue on your WooCommerce store? You should be spending more time working on making your business more profitable. Don’t waste your time dealing with bugs and plugin updates. Leave that to a developer that can do the task more efficiently.

If you’ve never outsourced a WooCommerce developer before, you’ll find that it’s not that difficult. We’ve outlined some things that you can do so you can save time and money when hiring a WooCommerce developer.

Why Outsource?

If you are asking yourself why you should even outsource, outsourcing will help you free up your time. More free time means you can focus on the more important aspects of your business. Also, outsourced work is cheaper. Don’t waste time going through forums and various support channels for help. Sure, you might be able to fix your problem but at what cost? That is time spent that you’ll never get back. You can outsource a WooCommerce developer that will do complex tasks in a fraction of the time.

What Tasks Can You Outsource?

You can outsource just about any tasks you don’t want to do. Outsourcing routine maintenance tasks is always a good idea.

Site Updates and Maintenance

There are plenty of tasks that you can outsource on WooCommerce and one of the most important one is your site updates. If you do not update your WooCommerce store on a regular basis, you are not getting important security updates. This exposes your and your customers’ data to cyber criminals.

Hackers typically look for outdated sites as they are easy targets for hacking. If you do not have time to do regular updates, you can have an outsourced WooCommerce developer do it for you.

On your end, you must ensure that your developer creates a back up of your site and tests updates on a staging site. Some WooCommerce store owners might be wary of updating their site because they experienced problems due to site updates in the past. This is the reason why you should test updates on a development site first. You should not wait for your production site to break because you haven’t been updating it in months. While your site can break when you update it, you can do this in a controlled environment. This is a lot better compared to being forced to take down your site while you troubleshoot. If this happens, your site could be down for hours or even days. You can do your site updates regularly to prevent this from happening.

Fixing Bugs and Other Issues

Things will break on your site every now and then. That’s an issue all ecommerce store owners will have to deal with. Instead of worrying about it, you can outsource a WooCommerce developer fix these issues for you.

Site Speed Optimization

Some elements on your site could be dampening your site speed. An experienced WooCommerce developer can help you optimize your site so it runs the fastest that it can.

Design Tweaks

If you need a quick design tweak, what would take you an hour or two to do might just be a 15-minute job to an experienced WooCommerce developer.

Adding New Features/Custom Development

WooCommerce is customizable if you know how to code. With a trusted WooCommerce developer, you can customize your site however you want to.

How Can You Save Time and Money When Ourtsourcing a WooCommerce Developer?

Find a Skilled Developer

Wooassist developers have spent years working on various WooCommerce sites. They have dedicated themselves to knowing everything about WooCommerce. If you are looking for WooCommerce expert, you can contact us. You can also try your luck hiring a freelancer at websites like Upwork. Try to find someone who has a lot of experience working with WooCommerce websites.

Wear the Project Manager Hat

If you’re going to outsource a WooCommerce developer, you’ll need to manage your projects. If you don’t have staff to do that for you, you’ll have to manage your projects yourself. Or you can hire Wooassist and you’ll be assigned your own project manager.

Use a Project Management Tool

There are several project management tools that you can use. You just need to determine which one would work for you. Some project management tools we can recommend include Asana, Kanbanflow and Trello.

Define Project Goals

A project is clearer if you have realistic and achievable goals. When talking to your developer about a project, always let them know what the goal is.

Make an Effort to Write a Detailed Project/Task Brief

Don’t downplay the importance of writing a project or task brief. Spending more time writing a detailed project brief actually saves you time. If you don’t write a good task brief, you will spend more time making corrections and asking for revisions. Define the objective and include all the necessary details in your task brief.

Prepare All Necessary Files

When you send a task to your developer, always send them all the necessary files needed to accomplish the task. Use appropriate file names to avoid confusion. Also, use common file formats. If you are using the cloud to share your files, make sure you grant the necessary access permissions. In the task brief that you prepare, it helps to include a note on what the files are for.

Prepare and Double Check Login Information

Provide all the necessary login information to the developer working on your tasks. We recommend testing the login information to ensure they are correct. For a developer, nothing wastes more time than finding out you cannot log in to a site you are working on. More time is wasted if they can’t get the correct login information right away due to time zone differences.

If you have not tried outsourcing a developer before, don’t be afraid to take the first step. You can free yourself from your WooCommerce woes if you work with a trusted developer. Let us know in the comments if you might have any questions about outsourcing.

How to Add “Last Updated” Date on Your WooCommerce Store’s Blog

May 1, 2019 By John Leave a Comment

Having a blog is important for ecommerce stores. A blog can help you increase your inbound links, sales, and leads. A blog also lets you show your expertise if you want to be an influencer in your field. If you’ve been utilizing blogs to give your WooCommerce store a boost, you should know that blog posts may go stale. It may lose its SEO value. However, you can update your blog posts so that it stays fresh in Google’s eyes.

By default, even after you update your blog post, WordPress will not show that you updated your post. It will still only show the date that the post was published. You can edit the publication date but that won’t help your SEO because Google has already indexed your post and knows that it is not new content. What you can do is to show the date that your blog post was last updated and you can do this using a plugin.

Benefits of Showing Last Updated Date

Showing the last updated date on your blog tells search engines that you updated your content. Fresh content will rank better on search engines. On your end, you have to make sure that you make meaningful updates.

For visitors to your blog, showing the last updated date tells them that your content is relevant and not outdated. Fresh content makes your post more reliable.

How to Add Last Modified Information on Your WooCommerce Blog Posts

How to Add “Last Updated” Date on Your WooCommerce Store’s Blog

To show “last updated” date on your blog, go to your plugins page. Search for WP Last Modified Info plugin. Install and activate.
After activating, go to Settings and Click on WP Last Modified Info.
Under the Post Options tab, click on Enable for Posts on Front End to show last modified information on your blog posts.
We also recommend enabling Inline Schema Markup. Enabling schema markup adds codes that helps search engines provide more informative results for users. In this case, the schema markup will allow search engines to show last update date on the search engine results page.
Tweak the other settings to your liking and click save when you are done.
You can also show last modified date on page when you click on the “Page Options” tab.

Here’s how it would look like on the blog page. You can see we have a post published in 2015 and was updated on April 2019.

After you’ve done all that, updating your blog posts should automatically add the last updated date. If that work, you can try basic troubleshooting tips.

If you have any questions, leave us a comment below or send us an email.