An eCommerce website isn’t just your storefront. It’s a sales rep, brand advocate and customer support service all rolled into one. The pages you build, and how you structure them, can influence everything from brand trust, SEO performance, scalability and conversion rates. To make your Shopify website work, there are some essential pages you’ll need
An eCommerce website isn’t just your storefront.
It’s a sales rep, brand advocate and customer support service all rolled into one.
The pages you build, and how you structure them, can influence everything from brand trust, SEO performance, scalability and conversion rates.
To make your Shopify website work, there are some essential pages you’ll need to build, some optimisation work you’ll need to do, and a specific way to structure your site so it performs at its best.
Lots of people assume the job of a homepage is to just look good.
Like it’s a magazine cover to entice readers to open it so they can get to the good stuff.
But it’s a lot more than that in eCommerce.
Your homepage has three important jobs that impact your entire website’s performance. Take a look at the example above from one of our Shopify clients, Charles & Ivy.
Let’s break down how this page answers the key questions of a Shopify homepage.
1 – It has to be clear about what you sell
For Charles & Ivy, they position themselves as a provider of high-quality fencing that lasts, which their homepage messaging makes clear.
2 – It has to show readers why they should trust and buy from you
Charles & Ivy use reviews from Trustpilot to build trust with readers, highlighting their high score from more than 12,000 previous customers. A great detail here is using written testimonials on the page.
These make the reviews more real, highlighting key points of their products and services.
3 – It should be obvious where users go next
Charles & Ivy do this in two ways. First, they have a clear call to action in the header banner:
For customers who are looking for a specific product, they then offer a clear path to shop by category:
Although every homepage will be different in design and look based on your brand, every homepage needs the same elements to encourage conversions.
Too many eCommerce brands try to be clever with their homepage headline. But what you might gain in novelty, you’ll sacrifice in users’ understanding what you sell.
Others waste the opportunity in their homepage headline with a generic “Welcome to X brand” message.
If you look at Charles & Ivy’s homepage as an example, they’re very clear that they sell luxury fencing that lasts, so customers who land on the homepage know they’re in the right place.
We’ve got another blog you can read on how to find the right keywords for your product and category pages.
Above the fold just means the content is visible before the user scrolls down the page.
It’s important to get your popular products, best sellers or key collections up top, because it means customers are immediately seeing what you sell without having to go looking for it.
Again, Charles & Ivy do this well.
Their homepage banner scrolls through key offers to entice users to browse. Above the banner is the main menu, which clearly promotes Charles & Ivy’s main products so users can browse without scrolling down the page.
High-quality images – that load quickly on mobile – are a non-negotiable for eCommerce websites.
When you’re promoting products directly to customers (with the aim being that they’ll buy from you direct on your site), you need your products to look great immediately.
Low quality images don’t reflect well on your brand, and reduce the chance of a conversion.
Charles & Ivy’s website takes this a step further by using high-quality videos that show off their products in real life situations:
3. Trust signals
Load your homepage with reviews, testimonials, guarantees, or anything that shows why potential customers should trust and buy from you.
Reviews and testimonials are particularly strong at encouraging conversions.
As customers, we can do all the research we want, but nothing is as strong as a recommendation from a real person who’s used the product we’re thinking of buying.
Again, Charles & Ivy do this well by including a module that pulls real Trustpilot reviews into their website.
They also do this in the homepage banner with their key guarantees about their product:
Minimalism can be key for an eCommerce homepage. Remember, the goal is conversions.
So don’t take up space on your website with anything that could distract potential customers from a purchase.
Keep the homepage clean, and have clear calls to action that tell the user exactly what you want them to do.
Collection pages (sometimes called category pages) are the spine of your Shopify website’s structure.
Each collection should be clear about the products the customer will find, and fit into your keyword strategy to target short and long-tail keywords.
Charles & Ivy make it easy to navigate their collections using the main navigation.
Then, within each collection, users can easily browse individual products using filters that break products down by new categories, like product type, colour, size or price.
This structure makes it as easy as possible for customers to browse products within individual collections, and it helps search engines understand the structure of the site, which improves SEO performance.
You should add internal links from collection pages to features or seasonal products, or those recommended or on offer:
This not only makes it easier for customers to find products they might be interested in, but also helps with SEO by helping spread authority between pages (as well as making it easier for search engines to find and crawl all your pages).
Product pages are your money pages. These are the pages where you convince browsers to become buyers, and yet many product pages are underinvested in and not set up for success.
Product pages need to show off your products, show customers the options they have for any customisations, and convince them that these are the products they want to buy.
To encourage conversions, your product pages should include:
Product pages should be optimised for keywords so customers can find them directly.
Without optimising these pages with keywords customers use when researching, you’re limiting how customers can find you (they’ll have to come through your homepage or collection pages).
Like you might guess, your product pages need to show off your products as best you can, so you need high-quality visuals of your products (and lots of them)
Show off products from multiple angles, in multiple settings and multiple colours if appropriate. These visuals help customers see what products will look like and visualise what they’ll look like at home:
Clarity is king when it comes to your pricing, shipping and availability.
If customers aren’t clear how much something will cost on a website, you drastically reduce the chances of conversions.
Similarly, customers want to know how quickly they’ll get the product when they buy it.
If you offer payment plans, they need to be clear and obvious on your product pages too.
Remember what we said about building trust?
Include reviews, testimonials and anything else you have on your product pages too
This is where things get a bit techy.
As part of your technical SEO, include product schema on each product page.
Customers won’t see this information, but it helps search engines understand what your page is about.
This helps search engines rank your pages and helps make them more visible in searches.
If you’re not confident doing this it could be worth bringing in a technical SEO agency to help.
Here’s the biggest mistake most eCommerce businesses make on the About Us page of their Shopify website.
They make the page about them.
Yes, you can tell customers some things about your business. Like when you started, what your mission or vision is, or even include meet the team pictures.
But writing about yourself on your About page is a missed opportunity.
Instead, think of your About page as a sales page.
Use it to tell customers about the benefits of buying from you. Whether that’s the quality of your products, your delivery and payment policies or even your return policy.
An About page is a great chance to give customers extra information they need to convince them to buy from you.
Your contact page isn’t just for when someone wants your email address and phone number.
Use this page for information that would just take up space on other pages. Like your address, email, showroom videos, or delivery information.
This is also a good page for more structured data and schema.
Your FAQ page is where you answer sales objections and also provide answers to common customer support questions.
The best way to handle FAQ pages is to group questions into a theme like:
These have become particularly important, especially when it comes to privacy policy and your use of customer data.
Policy pages should include information about key details (like how you’ll handle customer data) but also give customers information about your return policies, complaint policies and general terms and conditions of buying from you.
Once you’ve got all your pages together, it’s time to structure your website to make it easy to navigate for customers, and find, crawl and index for search engines.
All your website pages should be connected through a clear, scalable link structure and hierarchy.
The standard structure for your website will look like
Homepage → category page → product page → checkout
From a navigation point of view your products should never be more than three clicks away from your homepage (to get customers to a product quickly)
Your checkout shouldn’t be more than a page away from your product page. The longer a person has to wait before confirming their purchase the more time they have to change their mind, and the more chance you’ll lose the sale.
Creating a well structured Shopify store that has all the essential pages and structure you need to be visible online and encourage conversions is a lot of work.
But it pays off in the long term when customers are finding your eCommerce business and buying from you.
If you need help transforming your store into a high converting tool for your business, our Shopify development agency can help.
Speak to a member of our team and start your project today!
Our experts will be more than happy to help you!
Speak to us today!1. Let’s Talk
Book a 30 minute consultation call with one of our team so we can understand your goals for digital marketing and what services you need within your budget.
2. Let’s get strategic
Once we know where you want to get to, we’ll put a plan in place to get you there. You’ll get a clear outline explaining all the costs and what results you can expect.
3. Let’s start growing your business
Once we’re all pointing in the right direction our expert team will get to work delivering what we’ve promised and getting you the best ROI possible.
