8 Things Your Bigcommerce Developer Wants You To Know

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8 Things Your Bigcommerce Developer Wants You To
Know
Web Design Tips From BigCommerce Partners Ever
wished you could pick your developers brain? We
talked to our development team about the things
they wish BigCommerce merchants knew. Heres what
they came up with the top eight guiding
principles for Bigcommerce websites in 2018. 1.
Make Decisions With Data-
How can you be sure that changes you make to your
site are helping to grow your business? Invest
time (and maybe money) into tracking and
understanding your Google
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Analytics metrics. Understanding what pages or
features are converting and which are causing
bounces or abandonment can help you improve
performance across the site. 2. Website Content
Affects Conversion Rates-
Whats the most crucial thing merchants do to
ensure that the development work they invest in
actually pays off? Focus on getting great assets.
Product photos and copywriting make a
well-developed site truly sparkle, and are key to
getting customers to buy. The most important
thing you can do for your website is to bring us
great assets, said Devin Fitzsimons, an
IntuitSolutions lead developer. When we have
great product photos and great text, we can
leverage that into an absolutely amazing
BigCommerce site. 3. Images Affect SEO and UX-
When asked what they spent the most time
troubleshooting, our developers agreed that
images were the most pervasive challenge.
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A lot of clients think bigger is better when it
comes to image size, said Nowlen. Actually,
big images tank your page speed and hurt your
rankings. Fitzsimons agreed images were a common
stumbling block for merchants. Dont put text
directly on the image file, he said. Its
terrible for SEO, but almost everyone does it.
What you should do is have that text as a
heading and let your developer position it over
the image. That way, Google can actually read it
and count it positively towards your SEO. 4.
Page Speed Affects The Shopping Experience-
The most common reasons new clients reach out to
us? Their websites are too slow. And theyre
right to be concerned. Studies show that
customers expect websites to load in 1-2
seconds. Anything longer than that will cause
abandonment. Page speed optimization is a major
focus of all the development work that we do. But
our developers encouraged merchants to take a
big-picture view of page speed. Everything you
do on your website affects page speed, explained
Fitzsimons. For example, installing a chatbot
is a great idea for lots of sites, but it will
impact your page speed. The trick is to work
with a developer to limit the impact of your
design choices on your page speed. 5. Most
Shopping Carts Are Abandoned At Checkout-
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Ever notice that your customers tend to drop off
at checkout? Youre not alone. Research shows
that most ecommerce sites see checkout
abandonment rates of 40-60 percent. Optimizing
your checkout experience should be a major
priority for any BigCommerce merchant. We
designed our One Page Checkout to address common
checkout user experience concerns. It preserves
BigCommerces secure checkout process but gives
it a user friendly, single-page upgrade. 6.
Take Time To Understand Your Ecommerce Platform-
You may have been running a BigCommerce store for
years, but how well do you actually know the
BigCommerce platform? Our developers agreed that
understanding the back office is key to long
term success. When a client understands
BigCommerce well, our developers are able to
leverage more of its native features, which
results in a better- performing site
overall. Our most successful clients are the
ones who take time to learn the BigCommerce
platform, said Fitzsimons. Some of them have
dedicated ecommerce managers but not all of
them. The difference is, they invest the time in
understanding the platform and back office. 7.
Optimize For Mobile And Keep Optimizing-
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Your website isnt a static, unchanging thing.
You have to constantly work on it to keep up
with changing web standards. And with over 50
percent of search engine traffic now coming from
mobile devices, mobile experience is constantly
under Googles scrutiny. However, many ecommerce
merchants dont keep track of changing SEO
standards and end up with a mobile experience
thats not only clunky, but actively being
penalized by Google. Just because you optimized
your site for mobile a few years ago doesnt mean
its a good mobile experience in 2018, said
Nowlen. Its worth checking in to see if your
website is following todays standards and how
better to do that. 8. We Want Your Website To
Look Good, Too-
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The takeaway message is you and your developer
are on the same team. Across the board, our
developers said that they valued the
collaborative aspect of working with clients, and
that they took pride in making websites look
great. The end product matters to us, said
Brynne Zdybel, an IntuitSolutions developer. We
take pride in our work and it makes us happy to
see that your site looks great and is performing
well. Its a team effort, said Fitzsimons.
You are the expert on your business and were
the BigCommerce experts. Were bringing our
expertise together.