There are a number of factors that are likely to have an impact on ecommerce redesigns this year. These factors include the increasing popularity of video, images, and other types of rich content along with the continuing increase in mobile users. These ecommerce WordPress plugins will make redesigning your site far easier.
If you have an ecommerce store that is based on WordPress, the implementation of design changes is much easier if you use some of the many ecommerce WordPress plugins that are available. We’ll review several plugins that will ease the job of updating your site considerably.
With the rise of retina displays and faster internet speeds, high resolution images, as opposed to thumbnails and low resolution images are becoming increasingly common this year. Larger and higher quality images with the ability to zoom should be included in product pages this year.
For instance, Amazon gives its users the ability to zoom in on high resolution images by hovering over them. This type of image improves the site design and it also increases conversions, since shoppers have a better product description upon which they can make their purchasing decision.
Woo Commerce has a Cloud Zoom WP plugin that uses jQuery to create a hover zoom that is used on a number of ecommerce websites. When visitors hover over an image that is high resolution they can view product details. This plugin is well supported and it costs about $40 for one license.
Videos are being used more often on the product pages of ecommerce sites. Videos help to boost conversions by demonstrating products and the manner in which they’re used.
Some sites have created numerous product videos that are well integrated with their site designs. Videos are usually less than a minute in duration, but they are used to clearly demonstrate products to help visitors understand them better.
Some ecommerce webmasters have a preference for HTML 5 videos rather than embedded YouTube videos. They use HTML 5 because these types of videos are easier to integrate into site designs and they avert the less professional look of YouTube videos. There is an HTML 5 video plugin from Woo Commerce that gives you the ability to add videos into Woo Commerce product pages. This is a free plugin.
YITH also makes a video plugin the works similarly to the one from Woo Commerce. It gives you the ability to use a video on your product pages rather than an image. All you need to do is to set a video as your featured image and it will be displayed on the product page. This plugin is also free.
Scehma.org is a mark-up language that is recognised by Bing, Yahoo, and Google. Schema mark-up will provide the search engines with additional information regarding your page and the elements on your page. Google has been adding more ways of displaying their search results and it is a good idea for site owners to assist Google with these additional displays by provided them with more structured data, using rich snippets. One example of a very helpful rich snippet are star ratings that show up in some searches. They can improve the click-through-rate of your listing.
Marking up your site with Schema mark-up can be difficult. Although there are some tools available like Schema Creator, it can still be tricky. This plugin offers options for every product page, page, and post that makes adding mark-ups relatively easy.