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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.
We have a brand new article on the CommerceGurus blog this week from Maria on the topic of CLS.
Have you ever landed on a website to read an article or find out more about a product when suddenly the page elements shifted? Or maybe you missed the button right as you were about to click it and ended up clicking a pesky ad instead?
It’s probably fair to say that you had an unpleasant experience on the website.
In this article, we’ll take a look at why layout shifts happen, what CLS is, and how you can calculate it. We’ll also go over some actionable tips to help you reduce CLS on your website.
Learn about CLS and how to reduce it
I had a couple of questions this week about the standard thank you page in WooCommerce so I thought I'd highlight this previous post I wrote on the topic.
The thank you page is often an incredibly under-utilized part of an eCommerce funnel. It's a page which will have a buyer's full attention so it's a missed opportunity if you're not making it work much harder than the default template.
This is the exact guide we use on our own CommerceGurus site so it's well worth looking at for your own stores.
See how to transform your WooCommerce thank you page
I was interested to see that the web hosting company, Kinsta, have launched a new tool to develop WordPress sites locally called DevKinsta.
You can spin up a single or Multisite WordPress site with Nginx, MariaDB, and more with a single click. Take advantage of local database and email management tools to develop themes, plugins, and custom sites, all on your local machine.
It's available for Windows and Macs and looks like a solid alternative to my tool of choice, Local by Flywheel.
Check out DevKinsta to build WordPress sites locally
I enjoyed this post on comparing the build of a page between Gutenberg and Elementor.
Gutenberg's resultant page file size certainly seems to be smaller than Elementor's and on lengthy pages with a lot of DOM elements the disparity would be even greater.
The post does state that a comparison isn't really possible without an additional Gutenberg plugin such as GenerateBlocks. I find it disappointing that three years down the road, basic page building functionality is missing from core.
The conclusion sums up many people's feelings quite well:
With enough time, and addons, and patience, I could build most of my sites with Gutenberg— but I’m trying to run a business.
Gutenberg is fun to play with, and I enjoy dreaming of the day when it’s viable for me— but I like to put food on my table. Elementor still helps me do that more efficiently.
Read about building a page with Gutenberg and Elementor
Brian Dean has a great video on using free SEO tools to gain an advantage in 2021. Tools he covers include Seed Keywords, Exploding Topics, TubeBuddy, and the Google Search Console.
For each of the tools he’ll show you what each tool is, and what it does. He also provides tactical ways to squeeze the most value out of each one.
It's only 8 minutes long as is full of interesting use cases.
Learn about the best free SEO tools
Latest Shoptimizer updates
If you've been using our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme, we pushed a couple of minor updates this week in version 2.3.3, squashing a couple of bugs and adding some nice features. See everything on the theme's changelog page.
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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