How Can Jamstack Help You Increase Conversion Rate?

Intro

Jamstack is great for building websites that are fast, performant, and SEO-friendly.

Thanks to that, you get a great user experience pretty much out of the box.

But that’s not everything. It’s not only great for UX reasons. It’s a great tool to get your online ROI growing by accelerating your conversion goals.

Let’s have a closer look at that.

Problems and goals of modern web pages

Google is constantly penalizing many sneaky SEO practices. Lots of websites try to implement them to manipulate their positions in the ranking, yet whatever you come up with today, could be already penalized tomorrow and do more harm to your page than good.

On top of that, Google became tired of outdated websites that are only harder to scan. They are improving constantly, and they demand the same from websites that want to get listed higher.

Their goal is to make the browsing experience as smooth and clear as possible, and if you don’t join the movement, you may have to face decreases and a low-ranking position in your competition’s favour.

So what does it mean for web shops and business websites?

Measuring the right metrics

Many of the website problems are closely related to page speed and user experience.

Yet, the most important factor you truly want to measure and focus on is the conversion rate.

Let me explain.

If page load speed slows down over time, people will be less likely to make orders. Consequently, it leads to a drop in the conversion rate. For example, according to The State of Online Retail Performance report, every second delay in mobile page load can impact mobile conversion rates by up to 20%.

However, If you improve page speed and the user experience, but the conversion rate will stay the same, it means you need to keep working on improving other areas as well.

In another example, if you have a webshop, and you can design a custom checkout page, it may eliminate some minor thing that stops customers from making orders. Consequently, it can lead to an increase in the conversion rate. For example, you could design a single-page checkout instead of a multi-page one. Such a change for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Store resulted in a 21.8% higher conversion rate. And yet, again, improving checkout alone may not guarantee success in your case.

In other words – page speed and user experience can make or break your digital business condition, but the ultimate metric you should measure is conversion rate.

What is the conversion rate?

Basics alert: In short, it’s the number of conversions divided by the number of visitors.

Since we are talking about online business, the conversion occurs when someone makes an order or fills the form in order to make the first step in working with us. However, in general, it’s not always about orders – the desired action could mean signing up for a newsletter, filling out the contact form, or downloading an ebook. You name it.

Why is the conversion rate that important?

Taking care of the conversion rate may improve your business on different levels.

Some of them are:

• Lower costs of customer acquisition
• Lower costs of paid campaigns
• Higher revenue per visitor – in other words, you will earn more even if the traffic stays the same
• General, an increasing number of customers

But if the conversion rate is next to zero:

• The number of visitors doesn’t matter, even if it’s constantly growing.
• Page load speed doesn’t matter, even if your online store loads in a blink of an eye.
• Bounce rate doesn’t matter, even if it improved significantly in the last months.

So now, before diving into conversion rate optimisation methods (CRO) to improve it, we first need to establish a list of things that affect it.

What affects the conversion rate?

In fact, many factors affect the conversion rate. Changing any of them, even by a little, may improve (or decrease) the conversion rate on your website.

• UX/UI design
• Page load speed
• Accessibility
• Content
• Overall performance
• Responsiveness
• SEO

How to improve conversion rate

The process of improving conversion rate – also known as conversion rate optimisation (CRO) – may seem like a never ending process, and in fact it should be.

Building a business is a constantly evolving process, as well as taking care of your clients and your offer. Polishing technical stuff only may lead to the moment when all seems to be great, and yet, nobody is buying from you anyway.

So next to taking care of CRO stuff and improving your website performance, make sure you deliver the value people really search for in a clear and appealing way (and be ready to change it based on results).

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the systematized, ongoing process that should lead to an increasing percentage of visitors who take a desired action on the website or web shop. 

These actions may include:

• Making an order
• Filling out the contact form
• Signing up for the newsletter
• Downloading the ebook
• etc.

It’s also about understanding how users behave on your website or webshop, what actions they take, what content they engage with most, and where the hiccups stop them from taking desired actions.

However, it doesn’t end there. Conversion rate optimization consists of many other aspects that may need to be taken care of, which I already mentioned above. Let’s match them with actions you can take to improve these aspects and, consequently, improve the conversion rate.

The more pressing question is: how the heck we can improve conversion rate in practice?

Luckily, we have one answer in mind – Jamstack.

What is Jamstack?

If you are more of a business person, we made a Jamstack Guide For Business People which will help you understand the basics behind it, as well as get you better prepared for a talk with geeks.

However, to make it quick, Matt Billmann, CEO of Netlify, and Chris Bach came up with the name of “Jamstack” to make it easier to talk about this architectural approach in everyday conversations. Jamstack is all about using existing technologies and fundamentals of web development, not about creating something new.

Jamstack is there to help developers build faster, more secure and easier to scale websites and applications. It provides a possibility to use tools and workflows that boost productivity and improve the developer experience to help them.

How can Jamstack help you increase the conversion rate?

Companies decide to choose Jamstack because of many reasons. Below you will find only those that have direct (or indirect) and positive influence on the conversion rate.

• Front-end freedom – with Jamstack, you can create UX/UI design the way you want it as underlying themes do not limit you, and at the same time, you won’t compromise your webshop’s performance or functionality. 

• Page load speed – it’s one of the most important things for a website or webshop. And not only in the eyes of the customer but also from Google’s standpoint. If you want to stop losing clients because of poor webshop performance, improve it.
  
• SEO efficiency – SEO it’s not about growing organic traffic for the sake of it. It’s about bringing the right kind of traffic – people who are potential customers. Jamstack helps you achieve better positions in Google rankings because Google favours static pages (aka Jamstack pages) as they are fast, light and easy to scan. Also, Jamstack allows you to add metadata so users (and Google) will be aware of your offering.

• Accessibility – companies linked strongly with Jamstack like Netlify are well-aware of the importance of accessibility, as you can read, for example, here. Jamstack makes it easy to implement things like Night mode, which helps to browse websites at night or the possibility to navigate using just the keyboard. It allows people with different disabilities to browse through the sites and make orders.

• Content – this point is connected strongly with SEO efficiency as it’s crucial to create a lot of valuable content which is easy to find, and Jamstack helps you do that.

• Overall performance – Jamstack is all about performance which means more than just page load speed. It also means things like being able to make an order without a hassle, like a long waiting time or unsuccessful loading of some elements. All these minor problems may discourage customers from buying something from you, but since Jamstack takes care of overall performance, you have nothing to worry about.

• Responsiveness – Jamstack websites are responsive by default, and since more than 50% of traffic comes from mobile devices, you won’t lose clients because they can freely browse your webshop with their favourite device.

Jamstack is also great for improving a web shop user experience.

As you should already know, Jamstack helps you build a custom storefront for your customers so you can provide unique shopping experiences for them. That way, you can stand out from the thousands of similar-looking webshops and adapt the UX/UI design to your clients, their needs and expectations.

What’s more?

• You can build a custom storefront or PWA based on BigCommerce, Shopify or some other eCommerce platform. It will improve the UX and overall performance of your webshop built on top of these platforms.

• JavaScript SDKs like those provided by Shopify will help you to create a user-friendly shopping experience with Jamstack. Consequently, your customers will be more likely to buy anything from you.

• If you have more than one customer group, you can design a unique experience for each one of them.

Is Jamstack for you?

If you are hesitating if you should use Jamstack in your own project, here’s the video that may help you decide:

Further readings

• What is Jamstack? – A Guide For Business People
• Why Use JAMstack for eCommerce in 2021?
• Benefits of JAMstack Development
• JAMStack FAQ – What? Why? And Why Not?
• Migration to JAMstack: The Questionnaire