Typical Mistakes in eCommerce Websites

The web is full of e-commerce websites selling various products and services. Getting an e-commerce website up and running is one thing; getting sales from it is an entirely different ball game. As a leading e-commerce development agency, we get tons of requests to check and analyze the website's performance. We see the same mistakes committed over and over again. The owner of these eCommerce sites are generally oblivious to these mistakes and stay amazed by the aesthetics. Only an SEO expert like us know the challenges such a website poses to get ranked and build sales. Let'sLet's look at some of the mistakes e-commerce sites have.

Technical SEO

It is one of the biggest mistakes found on websites. The root cause for these problems is the need for more knowledge and its implications by the website developer who built it. How a developer sees and how an SEO expert requires it has many differences. Understanding the technical SEO issues the website may throw requires the developer to understand the SEO process well—something which might not be of interest to him.

A technical issue has a direct implication on the crawlability of the website. In other words, search engines do not index the pages or show them for SEO results.

At AMITKK, we ensure that the website undergoes a stringent technical audit before being handed over to the client. It ensures that the developer is held liable for the development and, to a reasonable extent, for the technical challenges the audit might reveal.

Internal Linking

Often sites are so poorly interlinked that they get shown as orphan pages in audits. It means that the link juice does not get passed from one page to another, and its link profile needs to develop.

Maintaining an excel sheet of the product pages or an ER diagram can be a good starting point. You can keep track of the keywords each page might be targeting and link them to related keywords on different pages.

URL Structure

People take URL structure very lightly and need help understanding its long-run implications. We have seen businesses needing better URL structures and working on their SEO for years. It becomes difficult to change the URL after some link-building activity has been done on them.

Hence keeping the basics of URL structure right from the start is always a good idea. Our website development process has a simple function that sanitizes the URL and covers all the mistakes one can commit before creating a URL.

Wrong Technology Stack

Due to a lack of knowledge and beautiful selling by the website development agency, businesses get tricked into using technology that is generally unsuitable for them. Explaining the implications of the technology stack can also be confusing, considering the client's background.

• We keep the technology stack simple.
• Small websites with low budget –WordPress or Shopify
• Decently big websites with a reasonable budget – Laravel and Next JS

SSL Certification

Having invested in getting the website up and running, owners give up when it comes to getting an SSL certificate. A simple certificate creates a big difference in user experience and SEO results.

We highly recommend the clients get the certificate installed and ensure it's there at the deployment time.

Website Performance

The developers also overlook website performance in terms of loading and optimization. After all, it loads just fine on their local system, thanks to the cache in the browser.

Google offers lots of free tools to ensure you stay tuned for the latest changes in website performance.

Images

We should optimize images from the bulk of heavy lifting during page load. The use of lazy load and preload are some concepts to improve the website's performance.

One needs to understand how the images will be displayed for different screen sizes and use appropriately sized images accordingly.

On page Optimisation

Poorly done on-page SEO is another challenge that websites have, and they need to learn about the problem when they run an SEO audit. The eCommerce websites we developed have a standard SEO system that clearly shows pages missing with on-page or even duplicate meta tags. This system is beautifully built in your admin panel and can also be restricted by the role.

Considering the humongous availability of e-commerce developers and development agencies, getting an e-commerce website is straightforward. However, getting a website that ranks easily and is free of mistakes requires a good e-commerce development agency like AMITKK.

Author: Amit Kumar Khare

Amit is a tech enthusiast and loves writing about it. He is a senior developer with good hands-on experience in digital marketing.