Do we have to say those words together, "Shopify CRO," or is it just a buzzword? Well, for us as an agency focused on Shopify, it is a must. It should come together. We honestly believe that it is not possible to do a good CRO without knowing the platform you are working on. I would say that it is not possible.
Of course, you can apply some known general CRO tactics, but 99% of e-commerce websites can do it too, so what's your advantage there? How are you going to stand out?
If you really want to stand out, you should go into details, deeper and deeper, very very very deep.
We understand that one person or sometimes even a team of people can't know everything about everything. We also don't know many things, but what we know is Shopify. We know it very well. We know it so well that we can say that we know it better than Shopify itself. )) Just kidding.
So, as I said, we went very deep and tried to implement very non-standard solutions for our clients. And we are happy to say that we have a lot of happy clients.
Successful stores are not going to tell you the CRO tactics that we have implemented for them. So, basically, you are searching for some secret sauce that nobody is going to share with you.
Only an individual Shopify CRO Audit can help you to find out what is wrong with your store and what can be improved.
In Shopify, if we are using the Shopify themes, most of the time the main problem is the apps. They slow down the website, make the website ugly, and again, they slow down the Shopify website.
Whose fault is that? It is Shopify's fault, yes, yes. They have decided to put all the functionality into the apps and washed their hands. Even the reviews functionality, which is a must for e-commerce, they don't support it anymore, at least before they had a native solution for it.
Shopify is a platform that is built on apps. They are making a lot of money from the apps. So, they are not going to stop it.
Shopify apps look odd; they are not integrated into the theme. The customer enters the website and sees that the website is not a whole, it is a bunch of different parts, like a Frankenstein. "Okay, I need a review, I installed the review app. I want a timer, I added the timer, and then another..." What's the result? I have a website where the blocks are different, they load at different times, and they look off.
With their last updates for the Shopify themes, they have made it even worse, masking it as a good thing. They made the injection of the apps into the theme even easier, which is not a good thing because the more apps you have, the slower your website is.
First of all, during the Shopify CRO Audit, we are going to check the entire website and identify the apps that can be replaced with custom lightweight coded solutions. Almost all apps are possible to replace with custom-made solutions.
This will help to have the website in one piece. For example, you are using some weird app for the timer, and the look and feel of the timer is not the same as the website.
This app will slow down the website, make it rank worse on Google, and make the user experience worse. The website will start looking like a cheap dropshipping store.
Don't think customers are not judging you by the look of your website. They do: "If you guys don't have enough money to spend on development, how come you are making a good quality product?" It is a logical question.
Next, we usually check the Shopify theme and the UX of the website. Most of the time, Shopify themes are made to satisfy the needs of most customers, which is why all the Shopify themes look the same. And as they try to make the theme very flexible, it has very limited unique UX solutions.
Usually, it has a very huge header with uncomfortable navigation, a huge footer full of empty spots.
They create a demo of the theme very appealing with nice images and nice products, but then you install the theme and you see all the weaknesses of the theme.
First of all, we need to think out of the theme. ))) We don't need to limit ourselves with the theme sections, layouts, and blocks. Our UX/UI designers rethink the entire website and create a unique design for the website.
When you don't put the theme first, you can create a unique design that will be different from the competitors and will be more user-friendly.
After that, we will implement the design into the Shopify theme. We will create the custom sections, blocks, and layouts that will be unique for your website.
As we have said before, Shopify is making the demo stores very attractive with graphics and images, and in fact, they don't care much about the speed of the website, especially with the poor approach to SEO important rules. We don't even talk only about the images, but the entire speed of the website; it is not limited to images only, third-party scripts, the analytics scripts from Shopify itself.
Okay, this is not our favorite part, but we have to do it. Sometimes it takes a lot of time and tedious work to make the website faster because we do a full SEO checkup, check the network requests, check the images, check the scripts, check the fonts, check the CSS, check the HTML, check the server response time... not a very pleasant work, right?
We create a priority list of the things that need to be fixed and then we start fixing them one by one. Sometimes we need to find a compromise between the speed, business logic, and analytics, but our experience helps us to find the best solution.
When your website starts performing better, oh my god, it is a pleasure to see the results. It skyrockets in Google, the user experience is much better. You should have seen the faces of our clients when they see the results, when they get 0 investment conversions directly from Google.
This is what we call outstand the competitors!
We don't have much to add to this because, in fact, we should have combined the Shopify Site Speed Audit and Shopify SEO Audit because they are very much connected. But I specifically wanted to mention this because we have seen a lot of websites that have a good speed but they lack in the website structure.
This has a special reason in Shopify because Shopify has limited possibilities to change the website structure, the URL structures are limited, and when we need to have a well-structured site for better ranking in Google, we have to do some tips and tricks to make this happen.
Only Shopify veterans can get hands dirty with this because it is not easy to do.
Though we have already checked much of the technical aspects of the website during the previous steps, we do a separate Shopify Technical Audit to make sure that everything is in place.
Shopify changes the approaches on how to add a product to the cart, how the cart API is working, how the other dynamic parts of the website are communicating with each other.
We check all the functionality and JS files responsible for the site functioning, making sure they are working properly and if they use the latest best standards and recommendations from Shopify and Google in general.
We have already mentioned that we are going to create a unique design for your website, but what if we have more to suggest? What if we have more than one design to suggest?
This is our favorite part because there is nothing better than the fight, right? We create two or more designs for the website and then we start the AB Testing. We show the different designs to different users and then we see the results.
It sounds very cool to run AB, but this is a separate big topic because we need to understand how we will set up the experiment. In Shopify, there are several ways to do it. For bigger tests, we can use separate templates and then load that template view using the ?view=template-name parameter, but for smaller tests, we can use different approaches, such as loading two different HTML blocks and then showing them to the users based on variations.
Then it is very important to understand how we will measure the results, what the KPIs will be, what the success criteria are, and how we will understand that the test is successful or not.
For the most accurate measuring, we should use two different tools, such as Google Analytics and the analytics from the AB Testing tool, because they can show different results, and we need to understand why they are different.
This is not the whole list of the things we do during the Shopify CRO Audit, but if you say Shopify CRO Audit, if it is a real Shopify CRO Audit, it should include all the steps we have mentioned above and even more.
At the end of the Shopify CRO Audit, you will get a 25+ pages report with detailed information about the aforementioned topics and suggestions on how to improve the website.
Shopify CRO Audit is a must-have for Shopify store owners who want to outstand the competitors and get the most out of Google and the users.