Your Essential Guide to Design an eCommerce Homepage That Drives Conversions

While there’s no one thing you can do to lead your brand to conversion after conversion, a close second is optimising your homepage so it becomes the best eCommerce homepage with the best odds for conversions.

Again, while there’s no one thing you can do for this either, there are a couple of tips and tricks you can follow to make it that much easier.

For instance, the following 10 and maybe a bonus eCommerce homepage best practices 2019 strategies need.

1. Keep Everything as Simple as Possible

The very first thing you need to understand about designing the eCommerce homepage that drives conversions is to keep everything as simple as possible.

That is to say, follow the KISS principle: Keep it simple, stupid.

Used in most industries, KISS basically means that the more complicated your product, pitch or design is, the harder it will be for your audience to understand the value you’re trying to convey to them.

As such, whenever you’re designing a page—like a homepage—you should always ask yourself if you can make things simpler. 

2. Likewise, Pay Attention to Hick’s Law

Similar to the KISS principle, another guideline for you to follow while designing an eCommerce homepage layout is to follow Hick’s law (sometimes called the Hick–Hyman law), which states that the more options are available to a person, the longer it will take for them to make a decision about which option is best.

This makes perfect sense when you consider that it takes you longer to compare two choices versus three, versus four, versus five, and so on.

For eCommerce homepage UX, this means limiting the number of choices your users have, which means focusing on one or two main CTAs that are to the point and clearly state the value being offered.

For a contemporary example, Neil Patel, marketing entrepreneur and co-founder of KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg and Neil Patel Digital, reduced the clutter on Crazy Egg’s homepage by 60% and saw a 13% increase in conversions:

3. Use Clear Navigation

Third in our eCommerce homepage design tips is to use clear navigation so your visitors can easily make their way around your site in case they need to gather more information about you or your products before converting.

To this end, make sure to have an omnipresent search box that takes the hassle of scrolling all the way up from the bottom of the page away, a logo that always links to the homepage so your users can always go back home, breadcrumb navigation so they always know how they got where they are, and that every page they can go to from your main menu serves its own purpose.

4. Follow the Rule of Thirds

Mainly used in visual industries, the rule of thirds is a guideline for composing images that requires you to visually divide an image into nine equal parts composed of thirds, with two vertical and horizontal lines that create four middle intersecting points of interest and balance out the whole thing.

That right there, those four points, is where you want to place what you want your visitors to see.

5. Use an F-Layout

Something else you can do relating to your content’s layout is make use of an F-layout that takes advantage of a user’s natural behaviour when browsing the internet.

As for what that behaviour is, researchers have found that people naturally view content in a screen in an “F” pattern, which means they look from left to right at the top of the screen, and then scan downward, from left to right again and again.

You can take advantage of this behaviour by placing what’s most important on your page along the F-shape lines, and the rest, less important content toward the bottom right.

6. Make Sure Your Website Loads Fast

Of particular importance in driving conversions is making sure your users have an optimal time on your site, which means respecting their need for getting information fast.

The thing is, as the years pass and we become more and more accustomed to fast internet connections that deliver results within milliseconds, waiting even a couple of seconds leaves us incredibly frustrated.

For instance, there’s even an “8-second rule” stating that if users have to wait longer than eight seconds to be convinced to stay in your site, they’re going to bounce.

And then there’s Google, who’s previously stated that PageSpeed is a ranking factor in their search algorithms, meaning that your potential customers may not even see your homepage in the first place if your site is too slow.

Tip: Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to improve your speed.

To top it off, one of the main eCommerce web design trends in 2018 was all about using responsive designs that ensure high speeds so your mobile users always have a good time on your site, so you better make sure that’s you.

7. Leverage User Data for Personalisation

Nothing drives conversions more than tailored offers based on something a shopper actually wants.

For example, Amazon knows this and always offers recommendations based on browsing and purchasing behaviour because, out of everything they have in stock, those items are the ones their users were actually searching for.

8. Delve into Conversational Commerce in the Form of a Chatbot

If you’re looking for a way to increase engagement on your site and drive conversions, look no further than a chatbot who resides on your page 24/7 and is always ready to serve your visitors, whether they already know what they want or want some suggestions.

In fact, 95% of consumers believe ‘customer service’ is going to be the major beneficiary of chatbots, and 57% are also interested in them for their instantaneity.

9. Migrate Your Website from HTTP to HTTPS

Due to the nature of their business, i.e. processing sensitive information like credit card numbers, security is one of the biggest concerns an eCommerce has to contend with.

Thankfully, an easy solution is to migrate your website from HTTP to HTTPS so you can offer an extra layer of security—and peace of mind—to your users.

10. Always Use A/B Testing When You Make a Change

Important for pretty much anything relating to marketing, but especially so when it comes to design, is conducting A/B tests whenever you change something on a page.

For those who don’t know, A/B testing is essentially just comparing two versions of the same thing to see what performs better, which means two versions of the homepage to see which one leads to more conversions.

Bonus: Make Sure You’re Optimised for Mobile Devices

Finally, this eCommerce homepage UX tip is coming as a bonus because mobile optimisation is something everyone should already know by now.

As such, the only thing we’re going to say here is that 53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load, and not being optimised causes a slew of issues that mount up to LONG load times.

Let’s Take a Second Look

Designing the perfect homepage for your eCommerce business that drives conversions will not be easy, but following the design tips we covered today will lend a much-needed helping hand.

Let’s take a second look at those eCommerce homepage design tips:

1. Keep Everything as Simple as Possible
2. Likewise, Pay Attention to Hick’s Law
3. Use Clear Navigation
4. Follow the Rule of Thirds
5. Use an F-Layout
6. Make Sure Your Website Loads Fast
7. Leverage User Data for Personalisation
8. Delve into Conversational Commerce in the Form of a Chatbot
9. Migrate Your Website from HTTP to HTTPS
10. Always Use A/B Testing When You Make a Change
11. Make Sure You’re Optimised for Mobile Devices