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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.
Translating your website is a surprisingly easy way to reach and attract new audiences and scale into new markets by offering additional languages on your site.
However, WordPress users there isn’t actually a built-in feature – you’ll need to install a WordPress multilingual plugin to achieve a fully translated website.
Luckily there are a number of excellent multilingual plugins to choose from that easily allow you to add multiple languages to your website.
In this article we’ll take a look at what you should be looking for when selecting a WordPress multilingual plugin, plus show you five popular plugins, to help you choose the one that best fits your needs.
See our top multilingual plugin recommendations
I enjoyed this deep-dive into the usability of checkout pages and how in far too many cases they are over-complicated with too many form fields.
It's surprising to see the length of the checkout flow for an iPad on Apple's site outlined in detail. 6 redirections. 14 steps. 27 questions. At least 38 actions.
Since the article was written (2017) I'd expect Apple to have streamlined it since.
It would be a very worthwhile exercise to repeat the same steps in your own store and see how you could make such a flow easier and quicker for your customers.
Read more about checkout UX
For performance enthusiasts, Cloudflare’s APO (Automatic Platform Optimization) represents a huge step forward for maximizing WordPress performance.
In Kinsta's benchmarks tests, they found that enabling APO on a test site reduced page load times by 70-300% depending on testing location.
Cloudflare APO is available for both free and paid plans. For free users, there is an additional $5/month fee for APO.
But for $5 a month, it's a bargain considering the performance benefits it provides.
We'll be writing our own guide on this in the coming weeks so look out for that too.
Read Kinsta's guide to Cloudflare APO
Microsoft have announced a free GDPR compliant user behavior analytics tool called Clarity. The analytics tool helps site owners understand how site visitors are using a site and identify areas of improvement.
Engagement metrics, website performance data and debugging information give an idea of how to improve web pages.
Microsoft have said that in terms of performance:
“Clarity is designed to have a very low impact on page load times, so you can make sure users navigating to your site won’t have to wait for pages to load.
Additionally, we don’t place any caps on your traffic so whether you get 10 visitors per day or 1,000,000, Clarity will be able to handle your traffic with no additional cost for you.”
You can take a look at Clarity here
You may have come across the excellent Noun Project before, it's one of the largest icon collections on the web, made by designers from all over the world.
They've just launched a stock photography section and the quality of the assets provided are uniformly excellent.
They offer basic downloads for free (licensed under Creative Commons) at a resolution of about 1225px in width.
You can get a full high-res download of any photo for $33 which is a reasonable price if you're looking for something special, say on the homepage of your site or store.
Check out the Noun Project's Photography area
Latest Shoptimizer updates
If you've been using our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme, we pushed a couple of minor updates this week in version 2.2.9, which includes some more fixes and enhancements to our CommerceKit plugin. It keeps getting better and better.
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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