Knowing and utilizing eCommerce homepage best practices can boost your business growth! Imagine passing by a store with a leaky roof, broken windows, and chipped walls. You’d hardly want to go into the store, right?

In the same way, your eCommerce homepage makes the first impression for your business. Therefore, you want to ensure your homepage makes visitors to your website stay and eventually become customers.

But, how do you do this? The key is to ensure that users get the best experience possible when they visit your website, and we’ve got some pro-tips to help you!

In this article, we share insight into the best practices to help you maximize your eCommerce homepage. But first, why do you need to stay on top of your website homepage. Keep reading to find out.

Why You Should Optimize Your eCommerce Homepage

Here are the top reasons you should ensure your website homepage experience is at its peak:

• Your homepage is the first introduction to your products and your brand for most of your users.
• By optimizing your homepage, customers will be able to locate your business online quickly.
• A well-optimized homepage will make a great first impression on your visitors, effectively retaining customers.
• Applying eCommerce homepage best practices will inspire customer confidence in your brand and build trust
• Optimization of your eCommerce homepage will also help search engines understand your website.

Growing Your Brand: The best 7 eCommerce Homepage Practices for You

The following paragraphs contain eCommerce homepage best practices to enable visitors to your website to get the best experience possible:

1. Optimize your website for mobile use

Statistics show that many online shoppers today prefer their smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. In other words, if you want to have a better chance of converting visitors on your eCommerce website to customers, you must optimize your website for mobile use. 

Everything from your homepage, product pages, and landing pages must be easy to view and navigate on mobile devices. 

Therefore, you want to include mobile-friendly design elements such as clear CTA buttons and a hamburger navigation menu at the top of your homepage.

Also, it is best to have a responsive design that displays correctly, irrespective of screen size. 

By eliminating the need to zoom or resize when browsing your homepage, you offer visitors a more positive user experience. 

2. Add a search bar button for easy navigation

Customers need to quickly find what they are looking for on an eCommerce site. Otherwise, they will give up and move on to the next brand. 

To optimize your homepage for easy navigation, you want to include a search bar with autocomplete features. 

An autocomplete feature will save your customers time by recommending related products. If customers can find what they need quickly, they are more likely to convert. 

However, it is not to have a search bar on your homepage. You also want to make sure the search bar is strategically placed, preferably at the top of your homepage menu.

This way, it is more convenient for your customers to move between other product pages on your website and even your blog pages. 

Imagine your search bar is that helpful worker in your local store that is always available to help you find products you need. In the same way, it should offer your customers the same help, thereby making shopping easier and quicker. 

In addition, your homepage navigation must be clear and straightforward. It should be at the top of the page and well descriptive to avoid confusion for the average user. 

3. Highlight your most popular products

Highlighting your most popular products is one of the eCommerce homepage best practices that work.

If your store sells a different kind of product, you want to lead with the most popular ones. Displaying your most popular items will make it easier for your customers to find the products they need. 

In addition, seeing that a product is popular also serves as some form of testimonial for new customers. Also, your return customers will need to find their regular products easily without scrolling too much. 

A good rule of thumb is to focus on the product with the highest conversions and then display these as trending products. Additionally, you can feature them in the recommended sections for first-time shoppers looking for the best product to buy. 

This way, they don’t have to move between different pages before finding the best fit for them. 

4. Position your main products above the page fold

The above-the-page fold is that space visitors see without scrolling on a web page. Interestingly, surveys have shown that many eCommerce sites have increased conversions by placing their main products in this place. 

When you display your main products above the page fold, customers will find all they need at once without doing so much. You can experiment with different copies, CTAs, and images to see which brings the highest conversions over time. 

5. Optimize your loading speed

The last thing you want to do is delay sales by having a website that loads slowly. Any delay will lead to page abandonment, affecting your conversion rate. 

This goes for all the pages on your website and not just your homepage.

Therefore, it is crucial that you optimize your website for faster load times. You can use tools like Google’s Page Insights to see how fast your website loads and the changes you need to make to increase its speed. 

This can be anything from the image size, plugins to your website’s server. 

Here are simple ways you can increase page load speed: 

• Compressing your images
• Deleting or shortening code to minify your HTML
• Enabling browser caching

6. Display contact information at the top and footer

Next on our compilation of the best practices for your eCommerce homepage is high visibility of your contact information. You need to radiate trust and confidence in your brand to convert customers. Display your contact information prominently on your homepage is one of the ways to do this. 

Pro-tip: Add your phone number at both the header and footer of your homepage. This way, your customers can easily reach out to you if they need help with their purchase decision.

7. Display your customers’ photos on your homepage

Beyond displaying product images on your homepage, you also want to include your customers’ photos. 

Here is why: showing other people using your products effectively catches potential customers’ attention. It helps them visualize what your product will look like in use and encourage conversions. 

Besides, it also attracts visitors’ attention to your website, increasing their time on your page. You rank higher this way!

In addition, incorporating user-generated photos on your homepage will help to encourage more user-generated content. More user-generated content means a more engaging homepage and better conversions. 

Bringing It Home

Providing a good user experience is crucial to retaining customers, and this eCommerce homepage best practices can help you achieve that:

• Optimize your website for mobile use
• Add a search bar button for easy navigation
• Highlight your most popular products
• Position your main products above the page fold
• Optimize your loading speed
• Display contact information at the top and footer
• Display your customers’ photos on your homepage

By following these best practices for eCommerce homepages, you offer your customers a more enjoyable web experience, which is crucial in growing your brand.