If you’re looking to turbocharge your brand’s growth, you’re in the right place. Fospha, a leader in marketing measurement and analytics, has just released a game-changing report: “Elevating eCommerce: Secrets of Scaling Brands.” This isn’t just another report—it’s your playbook for smashing those growth goals. Let’s dive in.

Key Strategies for Different Growth Stages

Fospha analysed 71 eCommerce brands to uncover the secret sauce behind the top performers at each growth stage. Whether you’re a startup, scaleup, mature, or majority offline, there’s gold in these insights.By diving into real-world case studies and expert opinions, Fospha unveils the significant impact of full-funnel marketing and upper-funnel investments on sustainable growth.

Upper Funnel Advertising: The best brands aren’t just throwing money at ads—they’re strategically investing. On average, they’re dedicating over 18% of their Meta budget and 22% of their TikTok spend to awareness and consideration. Why? Because brand visibility is king.

Lifecycle-Specific Strategies:

Startups: It’s all about building that brand awareness with Paid Social. Think big, get seen.
Scaleups: Now’s the time to double down on conversion activities and impressions-led media. Make those clicks count.
Mature Brands: Diversify the marketing mix, increase upper-funnel spending, and explore international markets.
Majority Offline Brands: Time to dive into Paid Social, despite traditionally relying on click-based channels like Performance Max.

Real-World Success Stories

Fospha’s report is packed with real-world case studies that show these strategies in action. Check out these brand wins:

Pooch & Mutt: By ramping up their TikTok spend, they improved customer acquisition costs (CAC) and saw revenue soar.
The Essence Vault: They kept their CAC steady while boosting their Meta spend, demonstrating efficient budget management.
Represent: They took efficiency to the next level and expanded their presence in the US market, thanks to their savvy TikTok investments.

Insights from the Experts

Fospha teamed up with Meta Marketing Science team to enrich the report with expert perspectives on effective growth strategies. Alfonso, Marketing Science Partner at Meta, highlights the importance of accurate and actionable measurement systems for smart marketing investments and driving growth.

Download the Report for In-Depth Insights

Want to take your eCommerce game to the next level? Get your hands on Fospha’s latest report. It’s packed with the data-driven insights you need to navigate different growth stages and make your marketing dollars work harder.

Click here to download “Elevating eCommerce: Secrets of Scaling Brands” report.

About Fospha

Fospha is a new type of marketing measurement. Using machine learning to combine multi-touch attribution and marketing mix modelling in one view, provides clear, actionable insights on where to spend to maximise your growth. With a cutting-edge approach Fospha shows you the impact of all clicks and impressions, restoring visibility you lost with iOS14 & 17 and future-proofing you against further privacy changes

Snapchat driving spend growth at higher efficiency

Nutrimuscle is a fast-growing sports supplement brand that started using Fospha in June 2023. Their goal was to grow by increasing conversions and effectively allocating spend, but like many businesses, one of the primary challenges they faced was the inability to track key metrics (i.e. Cost of Acquiring Customers) and lack of transparency into campaign performance.

Nutrimuscle wanted to understand where to allocate spend, and which channels would be most effective for increasing reach and conversions. Last click and ad platform measurement wasn’t enough- this is where they turned to Fospha.

Brand-building, brand messaging, and brand-resilience

When defining brand messaging and personality, it’s crucial to establish what your brand is and, more importantly, what it isn’t. Ruchika Kalra, brand director at Lastminute, highlighted GymShark’s clear message: “We do gym.” This simple statement conveys the company’s focus and helps potential customers understand when the brand’s offering can be valuable to them.

Once the brand voice and proposition are defined, consistent messaging across all touchpoints and channels is key to customer recognition. Be self-aware when communicating with customers and consider their perspective on the brand after encountering your messages. Social listening is a crucial skill for marketers to develop in this regard.

Consistency in messaging doesn’t mean uniform communication across all customer segments. It’s important to “speak your customer’s language” and tailor messages while maintaining the same brand tone.

With the emergence of AI-powered tools, it’s crucial to understand their impact on brand expression. Don’t simply change your website’s strapline when introducing a new AI-fueled tool.

Izabela Misiorny, CMO at Siteimprove, points out that marketers should consider whether altering your brand expression aligns with your overall vision for brand-building. Ask yourself: Is it just a pointless novelty? What value can the “AI-powered…” expression bring to the brand?

Taylor Swift’s approach to building brand evangelists is another powerful strategy to consider. No marketing campaign speaks louder than personal recommendations. Creating a community of advocates can help your brand reach a wider target audience. For B2B marketers, this means finding allies and forming partnerships with brands that share a similar vision for making an impact.

Misiorny also emphasized community building, self-awareness, and empathy in marketing as key components of brand resilience. In the face of economic downturns, industry disruptions like AI, and pressure to follow trends, a resilient brand will survive and thrive in this fast-changing world. Marketers should also cultivate a discerning attitude, periodically sense-checking their direction while maintaining a consistent brand proposition.

Customer loyalty and customer-centric experience

Customer-centric branding and communication across all channels are essential in today’s market. With the cost of acquiring customers through advertising increasing by 222% in recent years, customer loyalty has become not just a marketing goal but part of a comprehensive business strategy. Marketers should leverage existing customer relationships for growth.

Jim Rudall, GM of EMEA at MailChimp, emphasizes that the key to success is creating a positive and memorable customer experience by integrating scientific insights and personalization to enhance engagement and loyalty. To achieve this, businesses need to understand the deeper psychological factors influencing customer behaviors.

Rudall mentions the Fogg Behaviour Model: Behavior = Motivation * Ability * Prompts. Understanding why customers support your brand, their readiness to do so, and when to engage them on this journey can help you better comprehend their motivations.

Rather than focusing solely on rational factors like price and quality in loyalty strategies, consider the cognitive factors that influence how people perceive value. Rudall introduces a loyalty wheel comprising four neurobiological principles: rewards, memory, emotion, and social interaction. These pillars help marketers understand the scientific underpinnings of loyal actions. Remember, repeat purchases alone don’t define loyalty.

Content marketing and content reach

There’s an ongoing debate about the importance of being entertaining versus educational in content creation. While brands can create significant momentum through clever use of trends and entertaining content, it’s crucial to align your approach with your brand proposition.

When creating content, it’s important to tailor it to each platform. Resources may be limited, but content that performs well on one platform doesn’t necessarily translate to others. For example, polished product videos might be more appropriate for Instagram, while behind-the-scenes content could be better suited for TikTok.

Jenna Rak, Senior Director of Audience Development, Social Media and Analytics at Vogue, shared an example of discovering unexpected engagement on Reddit around their political covers. This highlights the importance of exploring where discussions about your brand are already taking place on less considered platforms.

Audience feedback is crucial to the content creation process. Strategies for incorporating feedback include using social listening tools, reviewing comments on platforms like TikTok (where 92% of consumers are actively engaged in the comments section), and considering call center data to identify customer pain points.

Robb Miller, VP of Sales at Issuu, points out that as we enter the visual economy, dynamic digital solutions are becoming necessary for content marketing. Having versatile tools that enable easy content transformation and distribution across multiple platforms can significantly speed up marketers’ content distribution tasks.

Marketing efforts measurement and cookie-less world

The impending deprecation of third-party cookies is driven by legislative changes, company preferences, and consumer sentiment against tracking. Businesses heavily reliant on cookies should prepare for changes, such as Google Chrome’s phase-out of cookies, and adopt new technologies offering cookie-less solutions.

Contextual first-party data is becoming more prominent as cookies are phased out. First-party data provides clearer indicators of user actions and can be used to target advertising more effectively. Miranda Glover, CMO at UNRIVLD, suggests that when marketers put performance metrics into context, they unlock the power of data.

Paul Wright, Head of Advertising International at Uber, shares that marketers should focus on standing out and getting engagement from consumers in an ad-saturated world. For instance, Uber is shifting away from search-based KPIs to focus more on attention-based evaluation of ad performance.

Data is crucial for understanding customer behavior and optimizing the customer experience. Effective data management leads to better personalization and, consequently, more successful marketing efforts. However, as Rak points out, data should inform rather than drive creative decisions, reinforcing the need for a balance between analytics and creative intuition.

There’s an ongoing tension between creativity and measurable performance in marketing. While it’s necessary to justify marketing expenditure with performance metrics, it’s also important not to stifle creativity, which is fundamental for brand differentiation and engaging customer experiences.

Ian Gibbs, Insight & Planning Director at DMA, highlights a misalignment between measurement metrics and business objectives. With average marketing budgets falling to 7.7% of overall company revenue in 2024, it’s crucial for marketers to demonstrate which efforts generate positive effects.

Gibbs emphasizes a shift from performance marketing to brand marketing. Despite budgets still favoring performance marketing, investments in brand measurement are yielding better results, including shareholder value and profit growth.

To improve marketing effectiveness and measurement, marketers should focus on meaningful metrics that resonate in the boardroom, rather than campaign delivery metrics like video plays or social media engagement. Building a unified measurement framework for alignment across the business is also crucial.

The role of a modern CMO

The role of CMO is evolving and multifaceted in the digital age. Key traits for modern CMOs include:

Being experimental: Always allocate budget and time to test new approaches for delivering messages to customers.
Balancing AI and human creativity: While AI can aid in content creation and basic tasks, explore its use for data analytics and operational tasks to free up time for creativity and strategy. CMOs should champion originality in content and enable their teams to perform better.
Enabling business growth: Marisa Thomas, CMO at Good-Loop, argues that CMOs should define their role based on the company’s growth stage and be proponents for change.
Cultivating an innovative culture: As leaders, CMOs should foster a non-restrictive mindset, show vulnerability with team members, and create a culture of trust and innovation within their teams.

Conclusion

The insights from DMWF Global 2024 underscore the importance of adaptability, creativity, and strategic thinking. Marketers must balance data-driven decisions with brand authenticity, prioritize customer-centricity, and embrace new technologies while remaining true to their core values.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, scaling a brand effectively requires more than just an innovative product or service. For D2C and e-commerce marketers, understanding the intricacies of growth strategies across different stages of business development is crucial.  

A recent analysis of 71 brands offers valuable insights into the optimal strategies for startups, scaleups, mature brands, and majority offline businesses. Here’s what we learned. 

Startup Stage: Building the Foundation 

Key Strategy: Startups focus on impressions-driven channels like Paid Social to establish their audience base. This approach is essential for gaining visibility and creating a strong initial footprint in the market. 

Case Study: Pooch & Mutt exemplified this strategy by leveraging Paid Social to achieve significant year-on-year revenue gains while also improving acquisition costs. This foundational step is crucial for setting the stage for future growth and stability. 

Scaleup Stage: Accelerating Conversion 

Key Strategy: For scaleups, having already established an audience, the focus shifts to conversion activities. Increasing spend in impressions-led media helps continue generating demand while maintaining a balance with acquisition costs. 

Case Study: The Essence Vault successfully applied this approach, scaling their Meta presence while minimizing cost increases. This stage emphasizes the importance of efficient spending to maximize conversion rates and sustain growth momentum. 

Mature Stage: Expanding Horizons 

Key Strategy: Mature brands invest in higher funnel activities to avoid market saturation and explore international expansion opportunities. This strategic pivot ensures sustained growth and market diversification. 

Case Study: Represent scaled their efforts on TikTok, enhancing growth and improving Meta efficiency. By expanding their presence in the US, they exemplified how mature brands can navigate saturation and seek new markets for continued success. 

Majority Offline Brands: Embracing Digital Channels 

Key Strategy: Majority offline brands primarily invest in click-based channels like Performance Max. However, the analysis reveals significant opportunities in Paid Social, suggesting a balanced approach for optimal results. 

This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Nicolò, who asks:

“What are the best resources to learn SEO and who are the best people to follow online for good advice?”

This is a great question that goes to the heart of what a lot of people struggle with when learning SEO. There is a lot of information online.

There are a lot of SEO “experts.”

Often, there is a lot of contradictory advice.

So, how do you sort the truth from the fiction – the opinionated from the experienced?

People To Follow

The issue in the SEO industry is that we are often left in the dark. Google and the other search engines offer us morsels of information, and we run wild with speculation.

Unfortunately, this can then become “fact.”

The rumor spreads. Pretty soon, you’ll hear it discussed in agency pitches and incorporated into brand strategies, all without it being properly questioned.

Finding the truth amid all of this noise can be tricky. Essentially, you are asking me, “Who and what can I trust?”

Really, the answer is to find SEO pros to learn from who are constantly testing their own assumptions.

I’m not going to list names here. I don’t want to risk putting you off following an SEO on social media purely because I haven’t included them in my list.

There are a lot of highly accomplished SEO pros who I don’t know.

Instead, I’ll suggest some ways of identifying those people who are digging into SEO and drawing conclusions from data.

Conferences And Publications

Start by attending SEO conferences and taking note of the speakers who are bringing something new to the table.

These are the people who are conducting experiments or backing up their claims with their own case studies.

Similarly, look for authors writing in reputable SEO publications – like Search Engine Journal – read their work and follow those constantly looking to question conventional wisdom and prove or disprove it with data.

Conference organizers and publication owners perform a certain level of due diligence, which means you are a little bit safer following the people they have chosen to showcase than following strangers on the internet.

Follow Who They Follow

A good next step to expand your list is to look at who the people you identified above follow.

If the same names pop up on the social media profiles of these conference speakers and article writers, you can be reassured that they are bringing useful insight to the platform.

Try to identify who they are discussing SEO with on social media. Snoop on those conversations and see who your trusted list of people to follow are also having informed discourse with.

It’s okay, too, if the SEO professionals you follow do not necessarily agree with what’s being said by the other people, as long as those other people are bringing rational, data-backed opinions. Sometimes, we learn best through hearing both sides of an argument!

Ask For Recommendations

It’s also perfectly acceptable to ask for recommendations of who to follow online like this Reddit user did.

To avoid getting back the same small list of famous SEO professionals each time, consider reaching out to some of your “trusted” SEO pros from the list above and ask them who they would recommend for specific areas of SEO.

For example, are you looking to learn more about local SEO or ecommerce SEO?

Ask for recommendations of who they would turn to if they had a question in that field.

Be Part Of The Discussion

SEO is constantly evolving, and no single SEO expert has all the answers. We learn from each other and from discussing ideas and opinions.

It’s never too early in your career to take part in those discussions.

Join In The Conversation

Look for conversations that are happening on SEO topics and join in the discussions. For example, @MordyOberstein’s #SEOChat over on X or the Google Search Central Help Community 

Try some of the Reddit subreddits about SEO, like r/TechSEO and r/bigseo. There will be a lot of discussions (I mean arguments, really) that will give you some quick insight into what practicing SEO pros make of particular ideas or approaches.

You can simply read through questions and replies, or you can take part. Give your own thoughts and ask for critiques and opinions. Engaging in discourse and learning from others can help you to sharpen your knowledge.

Start A Conversation

Perhaps, if you’re feeling brave, you can start your own conversations in these forums.

There is always the risk that you might be met with answers by people who haven’t really practiced SEO that much. The great/awful thing about the internet, however, is there are always people waiting in the wings to argue and say an opinion isn’t valid!

Ask a specific question and crowd-source the answer. Wait for the arguments to be presented and countered, then use it as an opportunity to learn how to validate others’ SEO opinions.

Conferences And Meet-ups

As already mentioned above, seeing who is speaking at events can give you an idea of some reputable people to follow, but let’s explore that a bit more.

Learn Something New

Something I recommend to SEO pros, both experienced and new, is to attend SEO talks that don’t interest them. That might seem counterintuitive, but it can actually be extremely eye-opening.

The chances are that the aspects of SEO you find exciting are the ones you will actively seek to learn more about.

If you are interested in the technical side of SEO, you will likely look for talks on cutting-edge experiments, advances in load speed and rendering, or case studies about complicated migrations.

But you possibly already know a lot about that as you are already interested in it. Every once in a while, set out to attend the talk you are least interested in.

If you are a digital PR at heart, attend a tech talk or two. If you are an in-house SEO, attend a talk about client management.

By doing this, you have a high chance of learning something completely new that will enhance or complement your existing skill set. For example, the in-house SEO will be able to apply skills discussed in the agency talk to their own stakeholder management issues.

Some good conferences to start with include BrightonSEO (Brighton, UK, and San Diego), WTSFest (Philadelphia, London, Berlin), MnSearch Summit.

Read more: The Best SEO Conferences For 2024-2025

Look Outside Of SEO

A good way to expand your knowledge of SEO is to not just attend SEO conferences. Go to events where a more holistic digital marketing approach is spoken about.

Or, if you are feeling really inclined, go to one that discusses adjacent disciplines like PPC and email marketing. This way, you may well learn more about the context of SEO in the digital landscape and how to better implement it within a complicated marketing system.

There are several specialist conferences that cover marketing subjects like paid media, social media and content marketing available, including ADWorld Experience, Hero Conf, and Content Marketing World.

There are also large multi-discipline conferences that cover a wide range of digital marketing topics, including Moz Con, State of Search, INBOUND, and the Growth Marketing Summit.

Go To Panels

A conference talk is, by design, very one-sided (heckling aside!). The speaker presents the material how they want to and goes into as much depth as they feel appropriate.

Due to this, you don’t have any opportunity to hear other peoples’ views on the subject or even their challenges to the assertions made.

Panels, however, are more collaborative and discussion-focused. Many events that have traditional workshop or presentation formats will also have the occasional panel or fireside chat.

These are your opportunities to hear the views of multiple SEO pros, perhaps even disagreements on a subject.

Listening to more than one view of a topic will help you discern what you agree or disagree with and ultimately form your own opinion. It is a good way of preventing yourself from just agreeing with whoever you have heard speak on the subject most recently.

Participate In Webinar Q&As

Webinar question and answer sessions are another way to hear multiple SEO pros give their opinions on a topic. They will also allow you to ask your own questions to the participants.

For example, the Good Signals “SEO Office Hours” webinar hosted by Michael Chidzey and Jo Juliana Turnbull is a weekly webinar that allows viewers to submit their questions in advance or ask questions during the event itself.

Then, a panel of SEO practitioners will discuss their thoughts on the questions.

Similarly, if you want to hear directly from the horse’s mouth, you can participate in Google’s “SEO Office Hours” asking your questions directly to Googlers from the Search Quality team.

Read more: Top 17 SEO Podcasts For 2024

Communities

Many communities have been set up to help with learning SEO. Some are region – or demographic-specific to help with more nuanced questions or support those traditionally less supported in the industry.

These communities are designed to facilitate a safe space to ask questions and get answers from others in the industry.

This sort of networking isn’t just useful for increasing your practical knowledge of SEO, they can also help with job opportunities. There are a lot available but here is a selection:

Location-specific Meetups include:

Create Your Own

If there isn’t a community that serves your specific need, or you’d prefer something smaller, consider creating your own.

It could start off as regular meet-ups at local cafés where you get to know other SEO pros in your area.

Or perhaps, an online call once a month where you can just bring questions to each other.

Maybe you have met some other SEO pros you feel you could learn from. You might be able to invite them to participate in a Slack or WhatsApp group.

Create A Forum

Another way to create a community that uses existing infrastructure and is, therefore, much easier to create is through Reddit or other forums.

You could set up a “subreddit” for a particular aspect of SEO and share it on other SEO subreddits. That way, you can encourage a much wider range of people to participate without you needing to know and invite them all personally.

Resources

To finish, let’s return to the question I discerned at the beginning: “Who and what can I trust?” There are already a lot of resources online about SEO, some less helpful than others!

Newsletters

Other than online blogs like Search Engine Journal, there are newsletters that can round up breaking industry news and case studies.

For example, Aleyda Solis’s “SEOFOMO Newsletter” sends a weekly summary of interesting articles and webinars from the SEO industry.

Nikki Halliwell’s “Tech SEO Tips newsletter” offers news and tips designed to help solidify your tech SEO knowledge.

Tom Critchlow’s “SEO MBA” newsletter focuses on the career and management side of SEO.

Women in Tech SEO also has a newsletter for everyone in the industry to learn SEO from, summarising interesting articles that have been recently released.

Training Courses

There are a lot of SEO training courses out there, paid and free.

Some that have been highly recommended to me in the past are the Hubspot Academy, Semrush Academy, BrightLocal Academy, Blue Array Academy, and the BrightonSEO short courses.

Sometimes, though, you may want to go more in-depth into new areas of SEO. Perhaps you don’t really know where your skills gaps lie. For this, I would strongly recommend looking at Aleyda Solis’s LearningSEO.io.

It is a free and highly comprehensive roadmap of SEO concepts. It runs from beginner to advanced, with reliable free resources accompanying each.

Summary

There is a lot of information about SEO online. It’s an ever-evolving subject and that means more content will be produced on it all the time.

With that amount of information available, it can be overwhelming to know who or what to trust.

Use the suggestions and resources above to start to curate your own list of trustworthy material and people to learn from. That way, you can keep expanding your knowledge in a safe and helpful way.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

In 2009, by issuing a call to arms to “make the web faster”, Google set out on a mission to try and persuade website owners to make their sites load more quickly.

In order to entice website owners into actually caring about this, in 2010 Google announced that site speed would become a factor in its desktop (non-mobile) search engine ranking algorithms. This meant that sites that loaded quickly would have an SEO advantage over other websites.

Six years later, in 2015, Google announced that the number of searches performed on mobile exceeded those performed on desktop computers. That percentage continues to increase. The latest published statistic says that, as of 2019, 61% of searches performed on Google were from mobile devices.

Mobile’s now-dominant role in search led Google to develop its “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) project. This initiative is aimed at encouraging website owners to create what is essentially another mobile theme, on top of their responsive mobile theme, that complies with a very strict set of development and performance guidelines.

Although many site owners and SEOs complain about having to tend to page speed and AMP on top of the other 200+ ranking factors that already give them headaches, page speed is indeed a worthy effort for site owners to focus on. In 2017, Google conducted a study where the results very much justified their focus on making the web faster. They found that “As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.”

In July of 2018, page speed became a ranking factor for mobile searches, and today Google will incorporate even more speed-related factors (called Core Web Vitals) in its ranking algorithms.

With the average human attention span decreasing all the time, and our reliance on our mobile devices growing consistently, there’s no question that page speed is, and will continue to be, an incredibly important thing for website owners to tend to.

How to optimize a website for speed
Think like a race car driver

Winning the page speed race requires the same things as winning a car race. To win a race in a car, you make sure that your vehicle is as lightweight as possible, as powerful as possible, and you navigate the racetrack as efficiently as possible.

I’ll use this analogy to try to make page speed optimization techniques a bit more understandable.

Make it lightweight

These days, websites are more beautiful and functional than ever before — but that also means they are bigger than ever. Most modern websites are the equivalent of a party bus or a limo. They’re super fancy, loaded with all sorts of amenities, and therefore HEAVY and SLOW. In the search engine “racetrack,” you will not win with a party bus or a limo. You’ll look cool, but you’ll lose.

Image source: A GTMetrix test results page

To win the page speed race, you need a proper racing vehicle, which is lightweight. Race cars don’t have radios, cupholders, glove boxes, or really anything at all that isn’t absolutely necessary. Similarly, your website shouldn’t be loaded up with elaborate animations, video backgrounds, enormous images, fancy widgets, excessive plugins, or anything else at all that isn’t absolutely necessary.

In addition to decluttering your site of unnecessary fanciness and excessive plugins, you can also shed website weight by:

Reducing the number of third-party scripts (code snippets that send or receive data from other websites)

Switching to a lighter-weight (less code-heavy) theme and reducing the number of fonts used

Implementing AMP

Optimizing images

Compressing and minifying code

Performing regular database optimizations

On an open-source content management system like WordPress, speed plugins are available that can make a lot of these tasks much easier. WP Rocket and Imagify are two WordPress plugins that can be used together to significantly lighten your website’s weight via image optimization, compression, minification, and a variety of other page speed best practices.

Give it more power

You wouldn’t put a golf cart engine in a race car, so why would you put your website on a dirt-cheap, shared hosting plan? You may find it painful to pay more than a few dollars per month on hosting if you’ve been on one of those plans for a long time, but again, golf cart versus race car engine: do you want to win this race or not?

Traditional shared hosting plans cram tens of thousands of websites onto a single server. This leaves each individual site starved for computing power.

If you want to race in the big leagues, it’s time to get a grown-up hosting plan. For WordPress sites, managed hosting companies such as WP Engine and Flywheel utilize servers that are powerful and specifically tuned to serve up WordPress sites faster.

If managed WordPress hosting isn’t your thing, or if you don’t have a WordPress site, upgrading to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) will result in your website having way more computing resources available to it. You’ll also have more control over your own hosting environment, allowing you to “tune-up your engine” with things like the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Varnish caching, and other modern web server technologies. You’ll no longer be at the mercy of your shared hosting company’s greed as they stuff more and more websites onto your already-taxed server.

In short, putting your website on a well-tuned hosting environment can be like putting a supercharger on your race car.

Drive it better

Last, but certainly not least, a lightweight and powerful race car can only go so fast without a trained driver who knows how to navigate the course efficiently.

The “navigate the course” part of this analogy refers to the process of a web browser loading a webpage. Each element of a website is another twist or turn for the browser to navigate as it travels through the code and processes the output of the page.

I’ll switch analogies momentarily to try to explain this more clearly. When remodeling a house, you paint the rooms first before redoing the floors. If you redid the floors first and then painted the rooms, the new floors would get paint on them and you’d have to go back and tend to the floors again later.

When a browser loads a webpage, it goes through a process called (coincidentally) “painting.” Each page is “painted” as the browser receives bits of data from the webpage’s source code. This painting process can either be executed efficiently (i.e. painting walls before refinishing floors), or it can be done in a more chaotic out-of-order fashion that requires several trips back to the beginning of the process to redo or fix or add something that could’ve/should’ve been done earlier in the process.

Image source: WebPageTest.org Test Result (Filmstrip View)

Here’s where things can get technical, but it’s important to do whatever you can to help your site drive the “track” more efficiently.

Caching is a concept that every website should have in place to make loading a webpage easier on the browser. It already takes long enough for a browser to process all of a page’s source code and paint it out visually to the user, so you might as well have that source code ready to go on the server. By default, without caching, that’s not the case.

Without caching, the website’s CMS and the server can still be working on generating the webpage’s source code while the browser is waiting to paint the page. This can cause the browser to have to pause and wait for more code to come from the server. With caching, the source code of a page is pre-compiled on the server so that it’s totally ready to be sent to the browser in full in one shot. Think of it like a photocopier having plenty of copies of a document already produced and ready to be handed out, instead of making a copy on demand each time someone asks for one.

Various types and levels of caching can be achieved through plugins, your hosting company, and/or via a CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDNs not only provide caching, but they also host copies of the pre-generated website code on a variety of servers across the world, reducing the impact of physical distance between the server and the user on the load time. (And yes, the internet is actually made up of physical servers that have to talk to each other over physical distances. The web is not actually a “cloud” in that sense.)

Getting back to our race car analogy, utilizing caching and a CDN equals a much faster trip around the racetrack.

Those are two of the basic building blocks of efficient page painting, but there are even more techniques that can be employed as well. On WordPress, the following can be implemented via a plugin or plugins (again, WP Rocket and Imagify are a particularly good combo for achieving a lot of this):

Asynchronous and/or deferred loading of scripts. This is basically a fancy way of referring to loading multiple things at the same time or waiting until later to load things that aren’t needed right away.

Preloading and prefetching. Basically, retrieving data about links in advance instead of waiting for the user to click on them.

Lazy loading. Ironic term being that this concept exists for page speed purposes, but by default, most browsers load ALL images on a page, even those that are out of sight until a user scrolls down to them. Implementing lazy loading means telling the browser to be lazy and wait on loading those out-of-sight images until the user actually scrolls there.

Serving images in next-gen formats. New image formats such as WebP can be loaded much faster by browsers than the old-fashioned JPEG and PNG formats. But it’s important to note that not all browsers can support these new formats just yet — so be sure to use a plugin that can serve up the next-gen versions to browsers that support them, but provide the old versions to browsers that don’t. WP Rocket, when paired with Imagify, can achieve this.

Image source: WP Rocket plugin settings

Optimize for Core Web Vitals

Lastly, optimizing for the new Core Web Vital metrics (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift) can make for a much more efficient trip around the racetrack as well.

Image source

These are pretty technical concepts, but here’s a quick overview to get you familiar with what they mean:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) refers to the painting of the largest element on the page. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will tell you which element is considered to be the LCP element of a page. A lot of times this is a hero image or large slider area, but it varies from page to page, so run the tool to identify the LCP in your page and then think about what you can do to make that particular element load faster.

First Input Delay (FID) is the delay between the user’s first action and the browser’s ability to respond to it. An example of an FID issue would be a button that is visible to a user sooner than it becomes clickable. The delay would be caused by the click functionality loading notably later than the button itself.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a set of three big words that refer to one simple concept. You know when you’re loading up a webpage on your phone and you go to click on something or read something but then it hops up or down because something else loaded above it or below it? That movement is CLS, it’s majorly annoying, and it’s a byproduct of inefficient page painting.

In conclusion, race car > golf cart

Page speed optimization is certainly complex and confusing, but it’s an essential component to achieve better rankings. As a website owner, you’re in this race whether you like it or not — so you might as well do what you can to make your website a race car instead of a golf cart!

Google’s Gary Illyes shares an unconventional but valid method for centralizing robots.txt rules on CDNs.

Robots.txt files can be centralized on CDNs, not just root domains.

Websites can redirect robots.txt from main domain to CDN.

This unorthodox approach complies with updated standards.

Successful ecommerce websites remove as many obstacles as possible between users and the products they’re looking for.

This list of features and policies was chosen based on their impact on user experience. Each removes friction from purchasing journeys to keep users engaged on your website.

29 Essential Ecommerce Website Features1. User-Friendly Navigation With Breadcrumbs2. Internal Site Search3. Product Filters4. 5. Product Videos6. Product Comparisons7. Product Reviews8. Generous Return Policy9. FAQ For Products10. Simple Checkout11. Multiple Payment Options12. SSO Integration13. Support/Help Center14. Order Tracking15. Mobile App16. Email & SMS Opt-In17. Push Notifications18. Chatbots19. Coupon Codes20. Special Offer Programs21. Wishlists22. Gift Registries23. Multilingual Support24. Loyalty Program25. Carousels26. Local Store Information27. Personal Data Policy28. An Affiliate Program29. A TikTok Shop30. Conclusion

1. User-Friendly Navigation With Breadcrumbs

The key to helping customers find the products they need quickly is to offer a user-friendly navigation system. Products should be logically categorized, with the most popular categories listed first.

Sephora knows how customers like to shop.

Some specifically seek out products by brand, while others shop by category. The navigation bar reflects this organization, along with quick links to value sets and current sales.

To help the user get back to the main page or product categories, Sephora also implements breadcrumb navigation throughout its site.

Navigation features should be tested rigorously on mobile devices to ensure that customers used to the desktop website can just as easily find what they want to purchase.

2. Internal Site Search

In addition to user-friendly navigation, site search is a feature found on most of the top ecommerce sites.

It allows customers to bypass the navigation and search for exactly what they want.

Nordstrom offers a site search with suggestions for popular brands and products matching your entry.

This site search even includes popular searches and trending searches near the customer.

3. Product Filters

For stores with a large selection of products, product filters can help customers quickly find the product needed based on features, size, availability, and other pertinent information.

Walgreens offers customers an item availability filter to sort products based on pickup, same-day delivery, shipping, or in-stock availability.

In addition, many product categories have filters related to specific types of items, separating medicines from cosmetics.

Have you considered the best way to utilize your website’s footer to help customers find your top products?

Try a list of links to the top products, services, and information that customers want to find.

T-Mobile uses its footer to direct customers to its social media profiles, English and Spanish sites, featured phones and plans, support, and company information.

The footer effectively includes links to everything the company wants customers and search crawlers to discover from any page on its website.

5. Product Videos

Adding video to your product pages can increase conversions.

Most ecommerce platforms allow retailers to add videos and images to their product pages.

Apple uses video to highlight features of its latest iPhone on its sales page. The high-quality product images and videos help sell its products online and in-store.

6. Product Comparisons

If you have a large selection of products to choose from in any category, let customers quickly compare the main features of each.

REI allows customers to do this with products like hiking bags.

When customers go to the comparison screen, they receive a detailed description of each product, ratings, reviews, and pricing.

7. Product Reviews

Product reviews and ratings are the most popular form of user-generated content on ecommerce sites.

This section of an ecommerce product page is crucial to providing social proof to shoppers that a product will fit their needs.

Amazon allows customers to add photos and videos to reviews, marking relevant reviews as verified.

Amazon has also experimented with AI-generated customer review summaries on some products.

While generative AI features are increasingly present in the ecommerce landscape, retailers should proceed cautiously, as AI content can be inaccurate.

8. Generous Return Policy

Want to increase consumer confidence in the products you sell? Offer a generous return policy and include it on your product page.

Better yet, make your return options as easy as possible.

Zappos does both by giving customers 365 days to return or exchange products and an additional way to return items with minimal hassle.

9. FAQ For Products

Another way to incorporate user-generated content into your ecommerce store is by adding a section of customers’ most frequently asked questions.

This section can help your store in some ways.

Increase the number of sales by answering your customer’s top pre-sales questions about your products.
Reduce the time your customer service has to answer product questions before and after the purchase.

Magic Spoon offers an FAQ section after customer reviews of its cereal.

When potential customers click on view more FAQs, they discover an organized section of answers for shipping, orders, and other inquiries.

10. Simple Checkout

The last thing you want to do before a customer is about to enter their credit card information is frustrate them.

Make sure that customers can easily find the shopping cart to check out. Urban Outfitters does a great job by adding a little checkout popup each time you add a new item to the shopping cart.

On the checkout page, you can see details about the items in your cart and can checkout quickly using PayPal or continue for more options.

You are also reminded of items you’ve saved for later and items that complement what you are about to purchase.

You can sign in or checkout as a guest on the following page.

11. Multiple Payment Options

Another way to make the checkout process easier is to offer customers multiple payment options instead of an account sign-up.

Online retailers like Xena Workwear let customers checkout using Shop Pay from Shopify, PayPal, and Venmo.

Customers using these payment methods on other sites will automatically be comfortable with the process.

12. SSO Integration

To help users create new accounts and sign in faster, integrate single-sign-on for your customers.

This allows customers to create an account and sign in quickly with their Google, Microsoft, Apple, LinkedIn, or another often-used account.

eBay is one of many major shopping destinations that offer this option.

Reducing friction during the signup and sign-in could improve your store’s sales volume.

13. Support/Help Center

In addition to the FAQ for your product pages and store, consider adding a help center.

This should cover any general questions people may ask about online privacy, security, payments, shipping, returns, and other shopping concerns.

Etsy offers help for many of the top support issues customers face in its help center, as well as help for sellers on the network.

This saves the Etsy support team from having to answer general questions and gives them more time to solve complex issues.

14. Order Tracking

Once your customer places an order, the top question on their mind is: When will my order arrive?

Make it simple for customers to check their current order status on your website.

AutoZone has an order tracking page that doesn’t require customers to log in.

Customers simply enter their email address and the order number they received in their order confirmation email.

The page is easily discoverable throughout the website in the footer.

Ecommerce brands on Shopify can also encourage customers to use the Shop App for easy order tracking, social posts, and review reminders.

15. Mobile App

In addition to having a mobile-friendly website that shoppers can access from any device, consider having a mobile app for your store.

Mobile apps allow you to keep your brand in customers’ minds by placing your app icon/logo on their smart devices.

You don’t have to wait for customers to open up a browser or another app for social media or email to get your latest sales messages.

You can push those promotional updates through your app to any customers with notifications as Home Depot does with its app.

16. Email & SMS Opt-In

Having a revenue-generating email list is a must-have for retailers.

If you can’t get visitors to purchase on your website, one of the next best conversions for your store would be to attain the visitor as a subscriber on your email list.

This would allow you to reach them with future sales and email promotions.

Another way ecommerce retailers can capture email addresses is by adding an opt-in form with a special promotion in the header and footer of their website.

Betabrand uses an introductory offer popup for new customer discounts via email and SMS.

A regular reminder for others is included in the website’s footer, product review highlights, and an order status page.

17. Push Notifications

If you want to bypass spam filters and social media algorithms, push notifications will be the next best way to capture your ecommerce store visitors as subscribers.

Push notification services allow visitors to subscribe to your latest updates in their browser.

When you have a promotion you want to notify subscribers of, you can send a message that will be delivered to their notification center via their browser.

Shein is one of many ecommerce brands that allows visitors to subscribe to push notifications.

Once subscribed, visitors will see the latest messages from the brand in their desktop notifications.

18. Chatbots

One of the benefits of running an ecommerce website is its ability to generate revenue 24 hours a day, seven days a week, throughout the year. That also means providing support to your customers during those hours as well.

Many ecommerce stores use chatbots to assist online shoppers with basic questions and navigate them to a specific product or support page.

Lowes uses “Leo,” an automated assistant with specific prompts for visitors to choose from when looking for a specific answer, finding a specific product, or solving a basic customer service inquiry.

Note that the chatbots for ecommerce stores are not necessarily the same as AI chatbots, like ChatGPT.

It’s important to research chat features before implementing them into an ecommerce store.

Even if the chatbot offers inaccurate information, your company may have to honor the information it provides customers, as Air Canada found out in a recent case where it had to pay a refund that its chatbot initiated.

19. Coupon Codes

We know that consumers often search for coupon codes on Google when presented with a coupon or discount box on a checkout page.

In the United States, 88% of consumers use coupons when shopping, using coupon sites like slickdeals.com, groupon.com, and retailmenot.com.

If you want to keep customers on your website throughout the checkout process, give them great deals via your own coupon codes.

Victoria’s Secret has an offer codes page to compete with coupon sites and publishers with coupon sections that double as affiliate revenue generators.

20. Special Offer Programs

Does your ecommerce store have special discounts for students, military, first responders, and others?

Ensure your product pages highlight those offers – especially for high-ticket items.

Samsung does a great job of doing this for new website visitors.

21. Wishlists

Add wishlist functionality to help customers find the items they wanted during previous visits.

The Nintendo Store makes it easy for logged-in users to save an item to their wishlist – they just click or tap the heart.

This will ensure they know exactly what they want the next time someone needs a birthday present idea or wants something for themselves.

22. Gift Registries

If you search gift registries on Google, you will find dozens of well-known brand retailers.

Target, Amazon, Walmart, Crate & Barrel, and Bed, Bath, & Beyond are just a few that appear on the first page of SERPs.

Why are gift registries important to driving sales? Let’s just look at wedding registries for a moment.

CNBC reported findings from Baird’s 2022 survey that Amazon leads as the top wedding registry provider with 45% listing penetration.

Walmart offers gift registries for babies, weddings, and classrooms. You can also create a custom registry to celebrate any occasion you choose.

23. Multilingual Support

If your ecommerce store caters to customers in a specific region, you have two options to support the top languages spoken in their region:

Depend on Google Translate to help customers translate your website into their language.
Create multiple versions of your website for specific languages.

Xfinity uses English on the www subdomain and Spanish on the es subdomain.

24. Loyalty Program

Do you want to increase customer retention? Offering a loyalty program is one way to encourage people to shop from your e-commerce store again.

These are typically free or paid programs where customers get private or early access to the best deals.

Many allow customers to accrue points per purchase, leading to rewards such as a specific dollar amount off your next purchase or a free product.

Ulta is one of many brands offering a free rewards program for loyal customers.

Customers can join for free and earn points redeemable for products and services online and in-store.

25. Carousels

While marketers may disagree on the value of homepage image and video carousels, many ecommerce brands use them.

Major retailers such as Walmart, eBay, Home Depot, Samsung, Wayfair, Lowes, Costco, Sam’s Club, and Kohls have carousels with their latest promotions and sales.

Chewy is another ecommerce brand that features a carousel on the homepage. This carousel promotes discounts for auto-ship orders, healthy pet food, flea & tick medications, pet bedding, and more.

26. Local Store Information

If your ecommerce brand also has physical store locations, you can boost offline sales by adding details for the nearest store to your website’s header.

This would allow customers to shop online, reserve for in-store pickup, or browse their local store inventory before making an in-store purchase.

Brands like Hobby Lobby ask about website visitors’ location to bring them more from their nearest store.

27. Personal Data Policy

Depending on where your ecommerce store is based and the customers it serves, your site may need a policy that notifies visitors of the data collected about them on your website using cookies from the website and other analytics tools.

Michael’s ecommerce store displays a popup advising visitors about cookie usage to enhance user experience and analyze website traffic.

Visitors then have the option to accept the policy, learn more about it, and adjust cookie preferences.

28. An Affiliate Program

Offer an affiliate program to get more content creators talking about your product.

This lets your top customers monetize their content by promoting their favorite products.

Major retailers like Target offer an affiliate program and creator network to create more brand ambassadors.

29. A TikTok Shop

Having an established presence on social media is a given. However, some brands have extended their ecommerce selection to TikTok Shop.

TikTok offers Shop products in a dedicated feed, allowing brands to partner with content creators on the platform for influencer marketing content.

Brands like OtterBox have even added vertical videos and branded hashtags to their websites to promote social commerce further.

Conclusion

Building a successful ecommerce website requires focusing on what you know about your customers, their journeys, and their needs. Then, you need to make those journeys as easy as possible to follow on your website.

The following principles apply as you build ecommerce shopping experiences:

Prioritize a seamless user experience for all devices and platforms.
Make navigation intuitive, search functions intelligent, and information readily accessible across all site sections.
Product descriptions should be detailed and immersive, featuring user-generated content like reviews and customer photos. In the near future, expect technologies like augmented reality (AR) to revolutionize how customers interact with products online.
Blend your online presence with brick-and-mortar locations, allowing for convenient options like buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) or in-store returns for online purchases.
With growing concerns about data privacy, clearly outline your personal data policy and emphasize secure payment options.
Make a strong commitment to transparent customer service and simple return procedures. This fosters a sense of confidence crucial for long-term brand loyalty.

The success of any ecommerce website ultimately depends on exceeding customer expectations.

Stay current on the latest trends with new technologies, and strive to deliver an exceptional online shopping experience.

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