|
View the web version
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 our latest hosting review Maria tests out Liquid Web’s Managed WooCommerce Starter plan on a WooCommerce-powered store to gauge website performance.
The starter plan is a very reasonable $12.67 per month (I'm not sure why they don't round that up or down).
As you'll see from the review we get some excellent performance scores throughout our testing.
If you're thinking about switching hosts, this is a review you'll want to check out.
See how LiquidWeb's Starter Plan performs
I spotted an interesting post on WooCommerce's blog about the many benefits of permitting pre-orders on your store.
Amazon, for example, often lets shoppers pre-order books at a discounted price a few months before they’re released.
This helps generate hype and buzz, and importantly for small businesses, cash flow, before the items need to be shipped.
WooCommerce has an official pre orders plugin which is mentioned in the article but there are other options.
This pre-orders plugin, available for free on the .org plugins directory seems to have very similar functionality.
Read about the benefits of pre-orders in WooCommerce
We've been closely following any updates to the Page Speed metrics Google uses, and in a recent post they've further clarified their CLS metric.
CLS stands for content layout shift - and it's basically that annoying moment when a site finishes loading and some elements move from their original position. This is particularly irritating if you were about to click on a link and end up selecting something else due to the layout shift.
We've been working hard on CLS within our Shoptimizer theme and have basically reduced it to zero (see our latest speed video to see more).
Based upon this new CLS update, our page speed has actually gone up by about a point. We're now hitting 97/100 (mobile) on our Cloudways test site which is great to see.
Read about the new CLS metric
I found this interesting post from Smashing Magazine from a few years ago about offboarding with a particular focus on eCommerce websites.
In the article, offboarding refers to leaving a website, cancelling a service, or even unsubscribing from an email. The author demonstrates some examples of how you can make the process more effective.
She includes examples of exit-intent popups and design patterns to get quick feedback from a user about why they are unsubscribing.
It's food for thought for your website or store.
Learn about customer offboarding
This week, Facebook quietly informed users of Facebook Analytics that the free tool will no longer be available as of June 30, 2021.
Until then, people will still be able to access reports and insights, and they’ll be able to export charts and tables. Advertisers and developers that want to retain access to their currently available data will need to export it to their desktop by the end of June.
This seems to be early action in response to Apple's iOS privacy changes in their soon-to-be-released iOS 14 update.
Read more about Facebook Analytics shutting down
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
|