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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.
In this WooCommerce hosting review, we’ll test out Kinsta’s Starter plan on a WooCommerce store to gauge website performance.
Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting provider that offers web hosting services to enterprise businesses and agencies. It offers SSD storage, free SSL certificates, and free CDN. Users also have the option to pre-install WordPress and WooCommerce.
We’ll start off with a brief overview of Kinsta’s WooCommerce hosting service and how it’s different from other hosting providers. Then, we’ll jump into the performance breakdown and analysis.
Let's get started!
See how Kinsta shapes up
Based on Baymard's most recent benchmark data, 10% of the largest e-commerce sites fail to have a consistently high level of detail for their product descriptions.
We covered this as a key point in my article on 17 Product Page Best Practices.
When desired information wasn’t available in overly brief product descriptions, some users during testing would quickly move on to consider another product — or even leave the site.
Some key pieces of information which should be included are:
- Materials and Ingredients
- Product Dimensions
- Compatibility Information
- Supporting product images
This is an important article to consider in the context of your own store and there are some excellent examples of high quality product descriptions to learn from.
See why a detailed product description is so important
Here at CommerceGurus we're always interested in any articles which explain how to improve the speed of a website.
Jake Archibald who works on Google's developer team has done a breakdown of Formula One website loading speed.
Not interested in F1? It shouldn't matter. This is just a performance review of 10 recently-built/updated sites that have broadly the same goal, but are built by different teams, and have different performance issues.
His before and after video at the end shows that with a few adjustments he knocks 72 seconds(!) off the homepage loading time when on a 3G connection.
See how to speed up a Formula One website
Wired magazine has an interesting article on the various issues dropshippers have with the new Brexit rules which UK businesses must abide by.
We've written about dropshipping in the past, and even built a live dropshipping store called HeadSoundsDirect using our own Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme.
According to the article, because of Brexit, shipping prices from China to the UK are ten times higher than before and there are far more delays at customs.
Because margins are so tight, forcing dropshippers to pay custom charges effectively eliminates their wafer thin profit making businesses in this area unviable.
With so many problems affecting UK dropshippers there may be increased opportunities for businesses in other countries to move into this space.
See how Brexit has been disastrous for UK dropshippers
I came across an interesting tool called Excalidraw which might be useful for anyone needing to quickly create a wireframe or explainer diagram.
To get going with it you just visit the URL and start drawing. No loading, no sign-up, just draw. From starting a diagram, you can generate a URL to give to others to let them see and contribute to the drawing.
It's free and completely open source and looks like a great little tool for simple explainer drawings, which you can also share and collaborate on with colleagues.
Take a look at Excalidraw
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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