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Mobile eCommerce Part 2: The Reckoning is Here

This 3-part series focuses on the movement of Internet users to Mobile platforms and the steps necessary to remain at the top of the heap. T minus 1 day and counting until Google begins is culling of sites considered to be “not mobile friendly”. If you’ve taken our advice, you are now sitting safely at software version 8.0.9, and are passing Google’s mobile friendliness test with flying colors (If not, Read Part 1). What else can you do to ensure the best mobile performance for your eCommerce website?

Activation: One-Click Mobile Friendliness

Is your mobile system turned on? By default, ClickCartPro 8.0.9 and EuropaCart 8.0.9 wake up with mobile support active and pass all Google mobile friendliness checks out of the box. But if you’re not seeing a mobile skin or a switch to toggle it on and off from the front page, you might want to pay a little visit to System > Component > Settings > Mobile Support and make sure your Mobile support is set to True. Also, you’ll want to go to System > Displays > Skin Widgets and make sure that the Mobile / Full site Skin Widget is turned on and assigned to a group. This is normally turned on and assigned to the Footer section of your site.

Branding: A Mobile Friendly Logo

This step in the ‘mobilization’ of your site is easy and fun. Have you loaded in a Mobile Logo? You’ll need to make sure it’s 300 pixels or less in width, so that it will look nice on a mobile screen.  All changes are made in your management interface.

First, go to System > Component > Settings > Display Skins and scroll down until you see the Mobile Logo heading. If you see a listing that says mobilelogo.png then it’s likely you’re using the mobile Kryptronic logo that the system defaults to. You’ll need to create a version of your logo which is 300 pixels or less so it displays properly on a typical mobile screen.

Content: Mobile Friendly Descriptions and Content

All products, pages and news articles that you can create with our software contains a Mobile Description field. It is not necessary for you to make up special mobile friendly description/content for each and every product and web page on your site, however if your regular Description/Content field contains large tables or images that won’t easily translate to a smaller screen, you’ll want to enter a mobile friendly version of that description/content in the Mobile Description/Content field.

If you’re using simple variations of text or dynamically-sized images (or CSS controls for those images), then you won’t need to change a thing. If you have doubts about the ability of a certain page, load up your site on your cell phone and see how it looks.

Media: Product and Category Images

Don’t worry about that 300 pixel rule when addressing the images that load for the products and categorys in ClickCartPro and Europacart. These are automatically sized by the software, and will conform to Mobile specifications without any intervention from you. The only images that aren’t automatically adjusted by the system are those that you manually link to in descriptions and content where HTML is allowed. That was just discussed in the section above.

Speed: Gone in 4 Seconds…

Though mobile devices are a great asset to those of us with online business and are great little hand-held computers, they are not loaded with the same horsepower as your laptop or desktop machine. It’s important to make sure you cater to their shortcomings. A rule of thumb is 4 seconds or less. If you can access any page on your site in 4 seconds or less, you should be ready to market to that segment of the industry with great success.

So, how can you measure your page draw rates? Manually running through your site is a good ‘basic’ way to gauge your site speed, but that can’t tell you ‘why’ a page is drawing slowly. Depending on which browser you use, there are free plug-in tools available that will tell you all of this info and more.

For Firefox users, try Firebug and the Net window. It will show you the elements on a page and how much time they take to complete. Google Chrome uses a little plug-in called Speed Tracer to accomplish the same thing. If you’re still using Internet Explorer, you can click on F12 to activate a panel that is similar to FireBug and click on the Network button for similar performance stats. Read the instructions for these items individually, but in reality, they all will show you the page and the elements on that page alongside the time they take to perform. This can be incredibly useful information to have at your disposal, so learning your favorite browser’s developer tools is a great idea.

If all of your pages are just drawing too slowly, you might want to consider a Fresh Eyes Website Analysis This is where are marketing and engineering folks sit down with your site and say, “What would I do if I owned this site?” For $299 it can provide useful information that you might never have thought of.

Another cause of this slowness could simply be that your host is too slow. Cut-rate hosting is worth exactly what you pay for it. Slow sites cause issues with search engine placement, customer retention, and the overall impression your site makes to others. Is this really where you want to save a few bucks? We’ve got tools we use on our hosting accounts like Compression and Caching to ensure the fastest page downloads for your site, prior to optimization of the site itself.  Check out Kryptronic Managed Hosting for a plan that fits your site.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion to this series entitled Kryptronic and Responsive eCommerce: Super-Powered Mobile eCommerce for 2015 and Beyond.

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