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Hi there, hope you're having a great Friday!
This is Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus, with a handpicked weekly roundup of eCommerce articles.
As a WooCommerce store owner, you don’t want prospective customers to land on a blank, empty web page that shows no signs of content being rendered on it. This causes a poor user experience that can lead to visitors bouncing off your website.
Since images are the largest, resource-heavy elements on your web pages, optimizing them is a great way to reduce page load times on your site.
This is particularly important for eCommerce sites that have lots of images on the homepage, shop, and category pages.
This latest article from Maria will show you how you can easily solve the “fix defer offscreen images” warning on your WordPress website.
Find out how to Defer Offscreen Images in WordPress
Baymard has released a very solid article on best practices when it comes to eCommerce Navigation UX which is well worth reading for all store owners.
Their dataset shows that there’s significant need for improvements when looking within the topics of “Category Taxonomy”, “Main Navigation”, and “Intermediary Category Pages”.
The issues identified in these 3 topics cause problems for many sites, and include some “missed opportunities” for the eCommerce industry as a whole.
Read Baymard's excellent article with lots of examples of Navigation Best Practices in eCommerce
Chris Lema has a very interesting post on the topic of WooCommerce's checkout pages.
He lists some great tools people can use to customize their own checkout pages.
As he puts it:
When most people think about WooCommerce checkout pages, they're thinking about the design. So they want something that looks like Shopify – regardless of whether it converts better or not.
Instead, store owners should be laser-focused on conversions; what works, what doesn't - and split testing continuously to find out what works best.
Read about WooCommerce Checkout Pages and what you should be doing
WordPress have announced that they will continue to support the 'Classic Editor' until the end of 2022.
Originally, support was due to expire at the end of 2021, but this has now been pushed back a year.
Currently, there are over 5 million active installations of the Classic Editor plugin.
Realistically, Classic Editor support will continue for the foreseeable future as there are so many WordPress sites reliant on it.
WP Tavern has an interesting blog post about this, with a lively debate below-the-fold in the comments.
Read about Classic Editor support in WordPress extended for at least another year
I spotted a useful tool last week called 'What WordPress Theme is That?', created by the web hosting company, Kinsta.
As you'd expect it's a simple way to discover the theme used on a particular site. It also displays the author, theme URL, and some other useful information.
Check out 'What WordPress Theme is That?'
Replacing Widgets with Blocks
As you're probably aware, WordPress replaced the trusty old widgets area in version 5.8 with blocks, or as it's also called, the Gutenberg editor.
This in my opinion, is still under-cooked. The main point of difference is the lack of a widget title in any of the blocks.
You could use a heading block, but this isn't a great solution for two reasons.
- The markup will be different so the styling won't be the same.
- For accessibility reasons it's not a good idea to have headings in a non-sequential order. So if you're using a H3 for a widget title in your footer, but you have a H4 in your main content above it - this will be flagged as an accessibility problem by web.dev.
Fortunately it looks like there's a solution on the horizon. Contributors have been experimenting with a new Widget Group block which will solve both of these issues.
You can see the GitHub issue here in more detail.
Until this is part of core, I think it's better to install the Classic Widgets plugin.
That's it for this edition. Simply reply to this email if you have any questions or suggestions, we read every message. Have a great week and best of luck with your projects!
Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus
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