With conversion optimization on the rise, it is a great idea to look into case studies which help you learn and adopt them to your personal needs positively. To find the material on conversion optimization you need from case studies, here are some few pointers:
- Find out which case studies reflect your situation currently in business and your future aspirations.
- Find out why a certain aspect of a case study worked and how to adopt it to specifically address your website’s needs.
- Ensure you keep the references of your case study in order to go back to them when you need them.
Find out which case studies reflect your situation currently in business and your future aspirations.Find out why a certain aspect of a case study worked and how to adopt it to specifically address your website’s needs.Ensure you keep the references of your case study in order to go back to them when you need them.
Receptive web design is time consuming and requires monetary resources to implement. It took Walmart Canada almost a year of work to refine the site and make it fully responsive. However, their results show that it provided a Return on Investment in months owing to the increased revenue of mobile gadgets.
Research
After finding out that the load of traffic which came from mobile devices and mainly from tablet gadgets, Walmart realized that the current solution did not really provide results on mobile gadgets. There were two problems, the look as well as the feel of their website on mobile devices proved to be really awful. Secondly, Walmart.ca realized that the pages on the site took too long to load.
Therefore, it was necessary to make the experience of the website faster as well as responsive on whatever device or screen size the website was opened. There was plenty of data from prior research on types of screen sizes as well as the browsers that would be best to utilize when a shopper visits Walmart.ca. Using this data, the team decided to move towards a completely scaling grid, which looked good for all the devices which their clients would use to access the site. The idea was to ensure that they check the target market for clients who make use of the tablet to browse their products and improve the site’s performance. By raising the site’s performance for this target market, then Walmart was guaranteed to get better conversion rates from their site.
The Execution
The giant shopping outlet used usability testing for both new and old designs. They tested a myriad of elements related to the site and finally tested the speed improvement for the site.
Tablet first
Essentially, the mobile-first movement recommended the use of viable experience, which showed that the use of smart phones helped in bringing up conversions. This required keeping the website simple. However, it showed that there was potential for ecommerce and increase in conversion as the order value would be higher when tablets were used as opposed to small screens.
Considering this significant traffic from tablet devices, Walmart realized that it needed to reach out to its most important customers; mothers. This would provide for easy shopping for moms from home, either while sipping their morning coffee on the couch or while managing home duties. The team chose to adopt a touch-centric approach that was tablet first. The design was meant to first incorporate smartphone and desktop capabilities. You can go to Walmart.ca and try to resize your device window to find out how well it responds to the site’s breakpoints.
Additionally, Walmart needed to retain a single code base and domain name. This is one of the benefits of choosing responsive to adaptive without sacrificing performance. If you do not prioritize performance tuning, there is great risk in going responsive. However, when the two factors are considered, then there is no major problem.
Built for performance
It is important to recognize that delays in page loading affect the satisfaction of your clients as well as the conversion rate you require. Therefore, there was performance testing complete with stress tests and Walmart managed to achieve 35% improvement. This was in terms of performance as well as the architectural design and loading mechanisms.
A key component for web optimization is caching. Walmart.ca is an ecommerce site that needs to be up to date in terms of location of stock, availability, as well as information on pricing. The delivery dates and all these factors can change throughout the day. Therefore, caching helps with managing the updates of all this information.
The use of icon fonts as opposed to images is another tactic that the Walmart site uses. It enables the pages to load faster and ensures that the icons have images which are sharp even when zoomed. With the use of icon fonts, one can choose the item they want to zoom in on as opposed to viewing all items on the webpage. Essentially, this tactic was enlisted to ensure that the loading process of the web pages is not slow. For a person who is shopping, the fonts will list the items they require in fonts and this will reduce the stress of having to wait for all the images to load in order to get the item they require. These were some of the technical changes made to the site.
With the new design, Walmart.ca managed to achieve a 20% conversion boost for all devices. For orders made on mobile devices, there was a 98% increase. However, the greatest insight they found from the tests was the presentation of the product availability. When they got rid of the “view details” for products that were not presently available, there was a definite boost in conversion.
Lessons
- It is necessary to be sure that you require a fully receptive design before you spend money on making the changes made in the case study. Walmart realized that most of its online clients visited their site using tablet devices. They then used this as a pointer and decided to adopt a fully-receptive design. You need to first analyze your traffic. Only after doing this should you move to a fully-receptive design.
- Ensure you rid your site of buttons that distract and elements that add little value and this will help with conversion rates. For instance, Walmart.ca removed the “view details” push button for items not available and this improved their conversion rate.
Author Bio: Jack Dawson is a web developer and UI/UX specialist. He likes to share knowledge and points of view with other developers and consumers on platforms. Visit more on 8 Steps to Choosing a Web Design Firm.