Your website design and content can influence the number of visitors you attract and the reputation of your store. When designing your website you need to focus on increasing traffic and preventing frustration as visitors navigate your store.

Take Advantage Of Product Information

Product information is not only important to tell visitors about a product, but the same information can attract visitors to your store. Visitors will find your store through search engines while they are looking for a specific product. Make sure you include any unique features about the product. Visitors may search for an item and add size, color or ingredient information to narrow their search. For example, if a product has a special feature, such as being cruelty-free, vegan or gluten-free, you want to include this information in the product description.

Upgrade Your Website Speed

Speed is everything when it comes to online shopping and you need to buy a web hosting package and design your website with speed in mind. You should purchase a hosting package with as much storage space and bandwidth as you can reasonably afford to minimize the chance files or traffic will adversely affect your website. When possible, you should periodically test the load time of your website, especially if you have made significant modifications.

If you can recruit friends with different internet speeds and devices, this will help you gain a better idea of the load time of your website. Although the load time of your website is expected to fluctuate based on the visitor's internet speed and device, your website should not be unreasonably slow.

Use Site Maps

The more items your store carries and if there are many features on your website, you will need to invest more time and effort into effective site maps. For complex websites, you should consider using breadcrumbs. This is the ideal mapping system to keep your visitors from becoming confused when navigating your website. Visitors can easily see where they are in relation to other parts of your website and not have to start from scratch if they want to look elsewhere on your website for a product.

Make sure every page on your website has obvious areas for visitors to go back to your home page, contact support, navigate product categories, view their shopping cart and go to your social media pages. You want to avoid any opportunity for them to become frustrated with your website and shop elsewhere.

Avoiding common pitfalls when designing your online store can improve visitor traffic and the reputation of your store. View your online store from the perspective of a visitor to spot common frustrations before they occur. Click here for information about web design.