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How to Conduct an Ecommerce Website Audit to Boost Customer Satisfaction

How to Conduct an Ecommerce Website Audit to Boost Customer Satisfaction

The world of e-commerce is becoming more competitive every day. It can sometimes feel like you only need to take your eye off the ball for a split second for the dial to start turning on your visitor traffic, basket spend, and revenue.

Successful ecommerce businesses rarely stand still; you’ll likely be continually tweaking areas to ensure your site stays well-optimized, competitive, and efficient. Among all these ongoing changes, however, things can get overlooked or cracks might start to appear. It’s important to take a step back now and again, look at the bigger picture, and make sure that your whole site is running like a well-oiled machine.

Doing an audit on your website means looking at the site’s overall effectiveness and user experience, identifying any weak spots, and finding areas where you could improve. Let’s take a closer look.

The Importance of Ecommerce Website Audits

Before we get into the how of doing an ecommerce site audit, let’s first explore why it’s so important. The idea of doing an audit might initially feel like an arduous extra task to add to your list of site maintenance, but it could actually make life easier for you in the long run.

Running regular audits gives you the chance to spot and rectify any issues ahead of time, before they start having a real impact on your site performance and customer experience—and ultimately affecting your bottom line.

Here are the top reasons you should be doing audits on your ecommerce site:

  • Customer Conversion & Retention: One of the quickest ways to lose customers is when they find your website clunky or frustrating to use. An audit can help you to find any pain points, like broken links or slow-loading content, that could be losing you sales. 
  • Competitive Advantage: Online customers are rarely short of options for where they can shop. If you want to keep their attention and loyalty, you need to be consistently outperforming the competition that’s also vying for their business. When you identify and resolve performance issues early on, you can make sure your site is running smoothly and keeping customers satisfied—leaving less room for competitors to move in on your territory.

 

 

The Importance of Ecommerce Website Audits

 

  • SEO and Performance: SEO can sometimes feel like an untameable beast. Just when you think you’ve cracked it, a new Google Update comes in and moves the goalposts again. Running regular audits can help you stay on top of these changes and make sure nothing has slipped between the cracks, ensuring your SEO efforts are getting the right results.

Steps to Conduct an Ecommerce Website Audit

1. Performance Audit

If your site content is slow, doesn’t work well on mobile devices, or your checkout process takes forever to load, chances are your customers are going to give up and jump ship before they’ve made a purchase. 

A website that performs poorly is one of the most common reasons for abandoned carts, so start your audit by taking a good look at some key performance metrics: 

  • Page Load Speed: Patience might be a virtue, but it’s certainly not one that many ecommerce customers possess. In fact, according to research, over half of users will just up and leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load. Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, or GTMetrix to check loading times, and be sure to check performance across both desktop and mobile.
  • Mobile Responsiveness: Whether it’s idly browsing while relaxing in the evening or the convenience of being able to shop while commuting, many of us now rely on our phones when it comes to shopping online. Having a website that is well-optimized for mobile is no longer a nice to have; it’s an absolute necessity. Make sure your website’s design adjusts to any screen size, so users can smoothly view and browse your site no matter what device they’re on.
  • Server Response Time: Check the Time to First Byte (TTFB), which measures the time it takes for your server to start responding to a user’s request. In simple terms, it’s how quickly your website begins to load after someone clicks on it. Ideally, you want to be aiming for a TTFB of under 200 milliseconds.
  • Hosting and Uptime: If customers land on your site to find it down once, they might shrug it off and try again later. However, if it becomes a regular issue, they’re likely to go elsewhere. Keep an eye on your site’s uptime and hosting performance to make sure it’s always running smoothly and efficiently.

 

Steps to Conduct an Ecommerce Website Audit

2. SEO Audit

When it comes to looking for a product or service online, most people don’t look much further than the first couple of pages of search engine results. So, if you want people to find your website, it needs to rank well. 

  • Keyword Optimization: Ensure that your website is targeting the keywords that relate to your products and what your customers are searching for. Make sure these keywords are used appropriately not just in your content but also in areas like title tags, meta descriptions, and headings (H1, H2).
  • Product Descriptions and Content: Performing well for Search Engine Optimization is no longer as simple as just dropping in keywords at every opportunity. The algorithms are becoming more advanced every day and now seek out content that is considered genuinely valuable to customers. That means making sure your website content is unique, relevant, and engaging and steering clear of duplicate content, which can negatively impact SEO rankings.
  • URL Structure: Your URLs should be clean, descriptive, and SEO-friendly. Long, complex URLs with unnecessary numbers or symbols should be avoided. Clean URLs increase usability and search engine rankings.
  • Sitemap and Robots.txt Files: Ensure that your website has an up-to-date XML sitemap in place, which allows search engines to crawl your pages effectively. Check your robots.txt file to ensure that you are not inadvertently blocking search engines from indexing important pages.
  • Internal Linking Structure: Make sure that your internal linking structure is logical, guiding visitors through your website and improving the crawlability of your pages for search engines. Use breadcrumb navigation so that users and search engines can easily make sense of your site structure.

 

Ensure that your website is targeting the keywords that relate to your products and what your customers are searching for

3. User Experience (UX) Audit

You’ll want to audit not just the technical aspects of your site but also its user-friendliness. As you add new products, categories, or content to your site, the user experience can become cluttered or confusing. A poor UX can lead to higher bounce rates, lower conversion, and even negative customer feedback.

  • Navigation: Is your site’s navigation intuitive? Customers should be able to find products easily without having to sift through multiple pages or categories or hitting any dead ends. Conduct usability testing to assess how easily customers can browse through categories, filters, and the search bar.
  • Search Functionality: Check your internal search engine is easy to use and returns relevant results. To make it even easier for customers to find what they’re looking for, you can also consider adding functions like predictive text and recommended products based on search queries,
  • Checkout Process: The checkout process can often be where customers drop off and abandon a purchase. If checking out and paying for their purchase takes too long or the process is confusing, they can get frustrated and go elsewhere. It can even cause them to question whether your site is trustworthy. Your checkout process should be quick and simple. Provide a guest checkout option, so users can make a purchase without the extra step of setting up an account, and offer a choice of payment methods.
  • Call to Action (CTA) Buttons: To encourage users to take the desired action while on your site, make it easy for them to do so by making sure CTA’s are prominently displayed and highly visible. This could be things like “Buy Now,” “Add to Cart,” or “Subscribe,” for example. Experiment with various placements, colors, and text to find the combination that gets the best conversion rate.

To better understand your UX, you can enlist specialist tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg to generate Heatmaps and track and record how users click, scroll, and hover while navigating your site. 

Additionally, you may already have valuable insights within your business—for example, recordings from virtual contact center solutions can offer valuable data on common customer pain points.

Ecommerce Website Audit : User Experience (UX) Audit

4. Prioritizing and Implementing Changes

Once you’ve completed your audit process, you’ll likely have a whole list of things you want to fix or improve, especially if this is the first audit you’ve done. 

You can’t address everything all at once, so start by focusing on the quick wins and the issues that will have the greatest effect on improving customer satisfaction.

  • Customer-Facing Issues First: Address problems related to user experience straight away as these have a direct impact on customer satisfaction and conversion rates. This could be things like slow load times or difficult navigation.
  • Optimize for Mobile: Mobile traffic continues to grow, so ensuring a fully optimized mobile experience should also be top of your list.
  • Security Enhancements: If your audit uncovered any security vulnerabilities, prioritize fixing these to maintain customer trust and protect sensitive data.
  • SEO and Content Optimization: Improve on-page SEO elements, keyword usage, and content to drive more qualified traffic to your site.

Using enterprise collaboration software can make it easier for teams to stay connected and organized, helping you quickly tackle the most important changes from your audit.

Stay Ahead with Routine Website Audits

Keeping an e-commerce website in top shape doesn’t need to be an overwhelming process. Regular audits let you step back, evaluate what’s working, and spot any small flaws in your strategy before they turn into bigger issues. 

It’s all about being proactive, keeping your website working to its full potential, and keeping your customers satisfied.

 

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