You’ve finally launched your online store! Hours of planning and hard work has gone into what is essentially the ‘Face of your brand. You’re excited, and your adrenaline is pumping. You’re officially an entrepreneur!
But we still have some way to go.
Launching your online store is most definitely a big step to take, but it’s only the first of many. Your website might be up and running, but that doesn’t mean your clients are running to your store.
As you sit at your desk, staring at the computer screen, waiting for orders to roll in, you can't help stop the millions of questions and thoughts you have running through your mind.
That’s where we come in. We have put together a handy list of recommendations for you to action after your website goes live.
1. Build it Right the First Time.
We have said this once, and we will say it again, your online store is the face of your brand. Virtually every client will search online for information about products and services before they click the checkout button. If your site is not well designed, chances are your potential client won’t even make it to the About Us page.
Don’t worry; we aren’t telling you to rebuild your brand new website. But we do want you to optimise the functionality of your website (also known as user experience or UX).
Tools like Hotjar help reveal the online behaviour and voice of your users. Combining both Analysis and Feedback tools, Hotjar gives you an aggregated view of user behaviour, showing how visitors have interacted with your page. This kind of data analysis can improve site designs with lower bounce rates, fewer drop-offs, more page views and better conversion rates.
Hotjar Analysis
Analysing your website post-launch is super important. Not only can you understand how users interact with the website, but it also allows you to see if the decisions you made during the site build are the right ones.
If there are some bits that you do need to change, you will be able to spot them within your HotJar tests and then talk to your agency about change requests to improve conversions.
With clients who join us on a partnership model after their site builds, we will always install HotJar on the website. This helps us assist the client to grow their website and offer recommendations on improvements and changes to increase those all-important key metrics.
User Testing
Similarly to HotJar Analysis, you can also run some user tests post-launch.‘Usertesting’, a paid-for-service, where we set up a series of tests/exercises for users to complete on your website.
User Testing allows you to test your website against your key target audience and analyse the results. Off the back of the results, you will then be able to create a list of recommended changes to your website based on what your users have done or said. You can then work with your agency to develop a list of these change requests.
2. Back-Up Your Website.
You have put a lot of work and time into getting your new site up and running, now would be the perfect time to protect your investment.
Rewind is an app that comes highly recommended here at Blend Commerce. In a world filled with hackers, server crashes, security breaches and most commonly - human error. You NEED an app that will regularly back up your store and give you peace of mind.
With Rewind, all order history, descriptions, pictures, and even SEO tagging is back up and retrievable. You can update your site without worrying about losing key content.
Rewind enables you to "Rewind" your store to a previous version with as little as one click. Rewind gives you the peace of mind that your business's most valuable asset is safe and secure.
3. What About Site Traffic?
The chances are that when your website goes live for the first time, it won’t make the top four or even top ten organic search results. And this is okay - for now. Your store needs to be optimised for search engines. Search Engine Optimisation is the primary thing that you need to get more traffic to your store.
If you are relaunching after a redesign, it’s not uncommon for websites to see a dip in organic traffic when you launch.
Typically, traffic dips are often because the site structure has changed - this is common when you are merging pages or splitting pages out, all in the name of a good user experience.
However, it’s important to remember that you still need to make sure that your site is content-rich and that the content that is on your website is human readable and not stuffed to the brim with keywords.
It’s often a scary time when your traffic seemingly dips, but do not panic; more often than not, it will climb back up, and should also quickly should increase if your site is built correctly.
Websites have many ranking factors, from the amount of content on the website to the structure of your website. All of these affect the site rankings in various ways.
It is highly beneficial to rehaul and/or relaunch your site every few years to update out of date code and clean up any code that has since become redundant.
By partnering with an agency for an ongoing relationship, you can work with them on an ongoing basis to ensure that your site code is kept to a minimum and clean and tidy.
4. Site Speed - Core Web Vitals
Slow Site Speed Kills Conversions.
Site speed refers to how quickly a browser can load pages from your site. Pages with longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates, lowering the average time spent on your page and inevitably killing your conversions.
Multiple studies have shown that users stay on fast-loading sites and convert at much higher rates. Additionally, a slow site speed can result in poor search engine rankings, lower site traffic and negative user experiences.
Core Web Vitals
With Google’s latest update on Core Web Vitals continuously working on your site speed is really important to make sure that your site performs and keeps performing well.
More often than not, you will need to do some optimisations pretty quickly after you’ve launched your website to ensure that your site is performing at optimum levels before search engines have the opportunity to crawl it.
Some factors that do tend to affect your site speed are things like the themes and apps that are used on websites. While there is a certain level of optimisation that needs to be implemented before your site goes live, it’s not always possible to get everything complete - so doing things after launch as well just allows you to to catch everything possible.
Here at Blend, we generally aim to reach and exceed the Shopify lighthouse averages (80 on desktop, and 15 on mobile), so if your site is performing under the key metrics then there will be a series of updates/changes that can be done to help your site reach those scores. This will also help increase your organic rankings too.
5. Use Email to Connect with Your Customers
Website traffic is significant, but you want to get into your customer’s inboxes. Email Marketing is one of the best ways to reach your customers directly, where you can build relationships, promote ideals and sell your products to people.
Not only does email have a vast user base (there are 3.9 billion email users worldwide), it offers an excellent return on investment.
If you don’t already have a substantial collection of customer emails, you must start building your email list by setting up a way for your website visitors to sign up to receive emails from you.
6. Get Help Managing Your Growth
If you’re in the process of launching your online store or redesigning your Shopify Store, you have likely experienced an immeasurable amount of growth in the last year.
Entering into an ongoing partnership with an agency will not only add additional members to your marketing team, but it will also allow you to concentrate on your day-to-day job. Having a team of experts within the industry that you trust and can rely on to create and implement recommendations on an ongoing basis will be crucial.
That’s where we can help you. Everything mentioned in the blog is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg of services we have to help you take your store to the next level.
Our On-Demand Digital Department is the first of its kind, consisting of a team of UI & UX Designers, Front & Backend Developers, CRO consultants, Growth Marketers and Strategy Consultants. A team focused on continuous learning and development and equipped to help you cope with your growth.
Ultimately, working with us as an agency allows you to benefit from the years of learning and testing that our team has to offer. Our reward for working with you is tied to your success.
Lets get the conversation started.
Published: July 23, 2021
Last updated: October 09, 2024
