The holiday shopping season will officially kick-off in a matter of days. No doubt, your e-commerce and marketing readers are both excited and anxious about the pending shopping frenzy. Will their websites stand up to the traffic? Is the content optimized and engaging?
But the biggest fears likely revolve around their mobile sites. And with good reason! A survey by web and mobile performance company Yottaa found that 58% of mCommerce users encountered problems with mobile commerce sites. And of those – a whopping 42% went to a competitor. But there's still time to fix looming issues before eager shoppers arise from their turkey-induced comas.
eMarketer expects mobile commerce to account for about 16% of total eCommerce holiday sales. Don't be a turkey when it comes to your mCommerce site. Follow these 5 tips to engage and convert mobile sales this holiday season:
- Test your site – Using free tools like websitetest.com or webpagetest.org, you can gain visibility into critical performance metrics before the big shopping rush
- Reduce requests — A cornerstone tactic for website optimization, this is even more effective for mobile since cell networks are so unreliable. Group and cut down requests to reduce the chance of running into performance issues.
- Reduce image performance impact — Images take up 70% of total bandwidth for mobile sites; image compression and right-sizing can noticeably reduce the speed impact of these bulky files.
- Reduce image impact on performance — When it comes to mobile sites, loading all images immediately can cause detrimental delays, since only a portion of images are visible in the viewport at any one time. Optimize images by delaying the load-time of images "below the fold" or loading images on command as they become visible in the viewport.
- Monitor over time — Mobile optimization is not a one and done scenario. Continue to monitor and chart performance to discover trends and recurring issues to ensure your visitors have an optimal mobile experience this season and beyond.