10 Best Practices for Ecommerce Web Design for 2024

Good web design is important for any website, but it’s critical for those in the ecommerce industry. Your virtual store is where all transactions take place, so it’s essential to design it in a way that makes purchases easy. So, what are the ecommerce web design best practices you can apply to make your pages more functional, intuitive, and appealing? Kreidman has shared 10 tips you can apply. Let’s dive in!

The Importance of Having Good Web Design 

There are three major ways web design makes an impact on your ecommerce website:

1. User Experience: Web design has a direct effect on user experience (UX). You need to create pages that prioritize smooth and intuitive UX to ensure easy navigation and ordering. Having good UX also adds to customer satisfaction. 
2. Conversion Rates: With great web design, you can easily move a customer down the sales funnel. The streamlined process can lead to higher conversion rates or more sales.
3. Search Engine Optimization: One underrated benefit of good web design is how it can help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Google, Bing, and other search engines can easily crawl and index your website if it has a logical and organized structure. This benefit makes it more likely for them to give your website a high ranking on SERPs.

Now that you have an idea of the importance of web design for your ecommerce store, here are the top 10 tips and best practices you should apply.

1. Streamline Your Navigation

Your navigation helps users find their way around your online store. If you don’t do it right, site navigation can feel clunky and illogical. Product pages may become orphan pages, which are harmful to SEO. To make your navigation more logical and intuitive, you can do the following.

• Keep your menu simple: Use categories and subcategories to ensure that products are organized into logical groups. Hierarchy is essential to avoid confusing your site visitors.

• Don’t be too creative — there’s a place for that: Your navigation buttons should tell the reader immediately where they will be redirected. Using other words or jargon for the sake of being unique will only make your website hard to navigate. Instead, focus on descriptive labels.

• Add a search bar: This integration allows users to look for something without having to parse through many categories and subcategories. 

2. Optimize for Mobile

Among our 10 ecommerce design tips, this one might be the most critical. Why do you need to optimize for mobile? Most people now make their purchases on mobile phones more than any other device. This rate will only increase with Gen Z almost exclusively using their smartphone to buy online. Make sure that your website is designed for small screens:

• Use modules and media that allow for faster loading speeds
• Product images should take center stage
• Make design elements fit the screens of mobile phones
• Consider the amount of text that will show
• Add call-to-action buttons that are easy to tap and separate from other page elements

3. High-Quality Product Images Are Key

Having high-definition images on various pages of your ecommerce website provides a few benefits. First, your pages look more appealing, leading to customers staying for longer and decreasing your bounce rate. In addition, the images can help increase SEO rankings if you add the right alt tags and captions. Be aware that too many high-definition images can slow down loading speed. Make sure to strike a balance.

4. Call-to-Action Buttons Should Be Clear

You need to have call-to-action or CTA buttons to entice your site visitors into taking the desired next step. These elements should be distinct from the rest of your content and eye-catching. To achieve this contrast, use bright colors and separate the buttons from text, navigation menus, and other modules. The buttons should also have an actionable copy like “Buy Now” or “Proceed to Checkout.”

5. Don’t Forget About Branding

Prioritizing simplicity and intuitive design doesn’t mean sacrificing branding. Otherwise, you’d have an online storefront that’s bland and indistinguishable from the rest. You still need to maintain your brand messaging without sacrificing good UX. Consistent colorways, fonts, and graphics are key. Done right, branding makes you distinct from the rest and can even instill customer confidence.

6. Color Plays a Huge Role

We’ve mentioned that consistent colorways can help with cohesive branding, but they play other roles in web design. Colors are powerful tools that can convey certain emotions, lead the eyes to buttons, and elicit excitement that can drive conversions.

It’s important to understand how colors can affect our perception of things so you can leverage them in web design. For example, if you’re selling food products, bright and primary colors can increase a person’s appetite. Those selling soothing skincare products can take advantage of greens and blues to elicit feelings of peace and calm in the website visitor.

7. Don’t Neglect Content

Text and other types of copy may seem separate from web design, but they play a major role in the appeal and usability of your website. Huge chunks of content make pages appear boring and even intimidating to read. Scannability is the most important. Make sure to break apart text into short paragraphs, use bullet points, and leverage easy-to-read fonts.

8. Social Proof Creates Feelings of Trust

As you can surmise from the ecommerce website design advice we shared above, all this has a lot to do with emotion. One other feeling you can achieve with good web design is trust. Customers who have confidence in your website and products are more likely to make a purchase. Make sure to add signals of trust like social proof. Have a dedicated page or section where visitors can see reviews, testimonials, or ratings. You’ll appear more trustworthy, resulting in increased conversions.

9. The Checkout Process Should Be a Breeze

A user-friendly checkout process is key to enhancing convenience for your site visitors. Otherwise, users can experience friction and slowness, resulting in cart abandonment. So add elements like progress bars and multiple payment methods. Design the process in such a way that there are at most three pages from the cart to payment confirmation. 

10. Make It Easy To Share Your Products on Social Media

Incorporating social media sharing buttons on your product pages is one way to facilitate the sharing of your offerings across various platforms. People who love your products are more likely to showcase them to friends and families. Having buttons that easily allow this practice increases traffic to your virtual store and heightens impressions.

Wrapping Up: Ecommerce Web Design Best Practices

Web design is an important process that helps you create an appealing and intuitive website. When done right, you can increase your SEO rankings, enhance customer satisfaction, and improve conversion rates. Make sure to follow the tips we shared above to get an idea of what to do with your website. If you need help with web design, Kreidman is the partner to trust. Contact us to learn more about our solutions!