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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.
Baymard published an excellent article this week discussing the UX performance and 8 common pitfalls and strategic oversights to be aware of for eCommerce homepages.
This are in order:
- Failing to Visually Feature a Broad Range of Product Types
- The Use of Overly Aggressive and Distracting Ads
- Incorrect Implementation of Carousels
- Failing to Assist Selection of a Well-Defined Scope
- Lack of Bespoke Imagery and Design
- Not Making the Search Field Immediately Obvious
- Incorrect Implementation of Country and Language Selection
- Visual Hit Areas That Don’t Match the Actual Hit Areas
Baymard's articles are a terrific resource to learn from and their insights can be used to improve your own store's design and usability.
Learn about the 8 common pitfalls when it comes to eCommerce homepage design
WooCommerce has patched an unspecified, critical vulnerability identified on July 13, 2021, by a security researcher through Automattic’s HackerOne security program.
“Upon learning about the issue, our team immediately conducted a thorough investigation, audited all related codebases, and created a patch fix for every impacted version (90+ releases) which was deployed automatically to vulnerable stores,” WooCommerce Head of Engineering Beau Lebens said in the security announcement.
You can read about what steps you may need to take in the official blog post on the matter.
Learn about the vulnerability in WooCommerce's blog post
I came across this free video course for WordPress, created by Nat Miletic.
This is too basic a level for most of our readers but if you build websites for clients who are completely new to WordPress this could be a great way for them to learn more about the platform.
The 2 hour video course covers:
- Introduction to WordPress
- Starting a new website project for free
- Installing a theme
- Installing required plugins
- Answering common WordPress questions
Check out the free WordPress video introduction course
Layout shifts can be very disruptive. If the layout shifts while reading an article, the reader will likely lose their place which results in a frustrating and distracting experience.
The Telegraph media group wanted to have at least 75% of readers to have a "good" experience.
As we mentioned in last week's newsletter, WebPageTest helpfully highlights where the layout shift occurs in the timeline view when "Highlight Layout Shifts" is selected.
Within a couple of months they managed to improve their 75th percentile CLS by 250% from 0.25 to 0.1.
This article explains how they diagnosed what was causing their CLS issues and how they went about solving them.
See how the Telegraph improved their CLS Web Vitals Scores
Since we heard the disappointing news that Jilt is shutting down, we've been on the lookout for a new abandoned cart solution for WooCommerce.
Why might someone abandon their cart? It can be anything – from getting distracted, to being surprised by the shipping costs, to leaving the site during checkout to find a coupon code.
Chris Lema has given his vote of approval to Recapture.io.
You don't get charged for the first $500 that you recover. There's a sliding scale for pricing based upon how much you recover.
As Chris puts it, if someone could help you add $15,000 to your bottom line, would you pay them $200?
Learn about Recapture.io
I came across an email delivery service this week called MailHawk which might be useful for anyone running a WooCommerce store who encounters problems with customers not receiving emails.
By using MailHawk to deliver your critical email, you are using their dedicated IP addresses, ensuring that the sender reputation is top notch so that services like Google and Yahoo will trust the email that you send is quality and not spam.
They now offer a 'Basic' monthly plan which is a rock-bottom $1 a month for 1,000 emails.
Take a closer look at MailHawk
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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