How to Make Your WooCommerce Site Mobile-Ready

Your customers are 3x more likely to buy from you if they can access your online store across multiple devices.

You can’t ask your customers to only use their desktops when they want to buy something from your site.

The mobile share of eCommerce sales in the US is steadily growing, and desktop eCommerce sales growth has stalled.

Having a mobile WooCommerce site that is optimized for mobile visitors is going to lead to more traffic, more sales, and more revenue for your business!

It can be tough to know where to start.  Here are 6 practical steps you can take to make sure your WooCommerce website is mobile ready.

6 Ways to Optimize Your WooCommerce Site For Mobile

1. Optimize Product Images

Your product pages are key to success for your WooCommerce store. It’s where your most important conversions happen and all of your revenue is made, so you need them to work for your customers on all devices.

Firstly, it needs to have the content that the user expects to find, but, it also need to be highly optimized for mobile. 79% of people won’t buy from a store if their website is poorly optimized and takes too long to load.

HubSpot found that a 1 second delay leads to a 7% reduction in conversions. You don’t want to be missing out on revenue just because of slow page speeds.

Images can a problem when optimizing WooCommerce sites. You need high quality images that show off your products in the best way, but they can’t affect your page speed.

To make sure your product pages run quickly, use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to discover where you need to make improvements.

Make sure you use a WordPress plugin like Smush to compress your images when you upload them, which won’t have an effect on quality for people viewing the photos. You could also manually run images through TinyPNG before adding them to your product pages to make sure they load quickly on all devices and will be fast on both WiFi and mobile internet. Check out our tips here to learn more about optimizing images for WooCommerce.

By making sure your product pages load fast, you’ll make more money from them!

2. Use a Mobile-Friendly WordPress Theme

If your theme isn’t responsive and doesn’t work on mobile, you’re not going to be selling much on mobile.

There are a host of mobile optimized WordPress eCommerce themes. Make sure to test any theme you install on your own mobile device before going live with it. Nearly all WordPress themes will be responsive, but it’s worth double-checking.

If your mobile site is un-intuitive or difficult to navigate on smartphones, you need to update it.

You also need to verify where your important CTAs like ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Add to Cart’ are located on your mobile site. Your responsive theme will likely re-position elements on your site, and if important elements like these CTAs are moved below the fold, it might hurt your product conversion rates.

3. Remove Lead Generation Popups

Lead generation plugins can be a great way to encourage people to subscribe to your newsletter, or add more information in exchange for a discount.

We all use these lead generation tools, and generally they’re going to increase your chances of conversion. But on mobile it’s a different story.

You may have experienced intrusive mobile popups yourself – they can completely ruin a mobile browsing experience if they were created without mobile visitors in mind. As well as being annoying to your site visitors, Google dislikes popups and overly invasive widgets on mobile as they can significantly affect usability.

According to Google:

1. Showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page.

2. Displaying a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.

3. Using a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content has been inlined underneath the fold.

If you do still want to include a popup, make sure you test it frequently and on both iOS and Android devices. There are some types of popups of banners that will be okay, but these are generally for purposes such as an App Install prompt, or mandatory cookie permissions or login screens. Capturing a few extra emails isn’t worth the price of annoying your mobile visitors, and being penalized by Google. 

4. Use Mobile Optimization WordPress Plugins

There are a range of WordPress plugins that will help get your WooCommerce site mobile-ready. Trying these plugins test how they will work on your unique website. These plugins should help provide your mobile website visitors with a superior mobile experience and ensure your site is responsive.

We recommend the WPtouch Pro plugin, which has a lot of functionality that will benefit your mobile site. Using this and possibly other tools, you can choose to include or exclude certain pages for mobile visitors, or convert your site into a Progressive Web App that will have more offline functionality than your website usually would.

When you install a new plugin, make sure you thoroughly test it. Test on a staging site and run it through one of the site health checkers mentioned below to ensure it doesn’t affect speed.

5. Test Your Site Health

Following the above steps should improve your eCommerce sites mobile experience, but you need to make sure there has been a tangible impact.

Consistently review your site health using a tool like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or the free Google PageSpeed Insights tool. These tools will highlight issues that aren’t always immediately obvious that will benefit your site as a whole. Issues such as broken links, image size issues, load speed, and other SEO related issues can hurt your site, and you need to keep them in check!

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6. Build a Mobile App

You can’t expect your customers to open up their mobile browser, remember your URL, type it in and wait for your site to load.  If you don’t have one, your customers are wondering why. Mobile apps aren’t only reserved for the biggest eCommerce sites anymore – any online store can have an app built for WooCommerce site with a service like MobiLoud.

Your own mobile app is the ideal place for loyal customers to return and easily make purchases through their mobile device.  Stores with a mobile site and shopping app generate 66% of sales from their mobile apps, and that figure is only going to increase, as we use apps for more and more things in our daily lives.

There’s a clear consumer preference for apps, and WooCommerce stores without apps are losing customers to competitors.

As well as being the ideal place for your existing customers to buy from you when they’re on their smartphones, the App Store also offers a new customer acquisition channel, and a branded app gives you a place on your users’ phone screens at all times.  You can also send  Push Notifications to engage with your customers and app users when you’re running a limited time promotion, have new items in stock, or just want to say hi!

A mobile app could be the next step to take to ensure your WooCommerce site is ready for mobile.

Wrapping Up

The mobile share of eCommerce is growing fast.

If your WooCommerce site isn’t mobile-ready you need to make these changes, or you’ll be missing out on traffic and sales to your competitors .

None of these improvements need to be costly or time consuming to implement. The sooner you start, the sooner your store will be ready for the mobile eCommerce revolution.