Ever wished you could pick your developers’ brain? We talked to our development team about the things they wish BigCommerce merchants knew. Here’s what they came up with: the top eight guiding principles for Bigcommerce websites in 2018.

1. 8 Things Your Bigcommerce Developer Wants You To
Know
Web Design Tips From BigCommerce Partners:
Ever wished you could pick your developers’ brain? We talked to our development team
about the things they wish BigCommerce merchants knew. Here’s what they came up with:
the top eight guiding principles for Bigcommerce websites in 2018.
1. Make Decisions With Data:-
How can you be sure that changes you make to your site are helping to grow your
business? Invest time (and maybe money) into tracking and understanding your Google

2. Analytics’ metrics. Understanding what pages or features are converting – and which are
causing bounces or abandonment – can help you improve performance across the site.
2. Website Content Affects ConversionRates:-
What’s the most crucial thing merchants do to ensure that the development work they
invest in actually pays off? Focus on getting great assets. Product photos and copywriting
make a well-developed site truly sparkle, and are key to getting customers to buy.
“The most important thing you can do for your website is to bring us great assets,” said
Devin Fitzsimons, an IntuitSolutions lead developer. “When we have great product photos
and great text, we can leverage that into an absolutely amazing BigCommerce site.”
3. Images Affect SEOand UX:-
When asked what they spent the most time troubleshooting, our developers agreed that
images were the most pervasive challenge.

3. “A lot of clients think bigger is better when it comes to image size,” said Nowlen. “Actually,
big images tank your page speed and hurt your rankings.”
Fitzsimons agreed images were a common stumbling block for merchants. “Don’t put text
directly on the image file,” he said. “It’s terrible for SEO, but almost everyone does it. What
you should do is have that text as a heading and let your developer position it over the
image. That way, Google can actually read it and count it positively towards your SEO.”
4. Page Speed Affects The Shopping Experience:-
The most common reasons new clients reach out to us? Their websites are too slow. And
they’re right to be concerned. Studies show that customers expect websites to load in 1-2
seconds. Anything longer than that will cause abandonment.
Page speed optimization is a major focus of all the development work that we do. But our
developers encouraged merchants to take a big-picture view of page speed.
“Everything you do on your website affects page speed,” explained Fitzsimons. “For
example, installing a chatbot is a great idea for lots of sites, but it will impact your page
speed. The trick is to work with a developer to limit the impact of your design choices on
your page speed.”
5. Most Shopping Carts Are Abandoned At Checkout:-

4. Ever notice that your customers tend to drop off at checkout? You’re not alone. Research
shows that most ecommerce sites see checkout abandonment rates of 40-60 percent.
Optimizing your checkout experience should be a major priority for any BigCommerce
merchant. We designed our One Page Checkout to address common checkout user
experience concerns. It preserves BigCommerce’s secure checkout process but gives it a
user friendly, single-page upgrade.
6. Take Time To UnderstandYour Ecommerce Platform:-
You may have been running a BigCommerce store for years, but how well do you actually
know the BigCommerce platform? Our developers agreed that understanding the back
office is key to long term success. When a client understands BigCommerce well, our
developers are able to leverage more of its native features, which results in a better-
performing site overall.
“Our most successful clients are the ones who take time to learn the BigCommerce
platform,” said Fitzsimons. “Some of them have dedicated ecommerce managers but not all
of them. The difference is, they invest the time in understanding the platform and back
office.”
7. Optimize For Mobile – And Keep Optimizing:-

5. Your website isn’t a static, unchanging thing. You have to constantly work on it to keep up
with changing web standards. And with over 50 percent of search engine traffic now
coming from mobile devices, mobile experience is constantly under Google’s scrutiny.
However, many ecommerce merchants don’t keep track of changing SEO standards and end
up with a mobile experience that’s not only clunky, but actively being penalized by Google.
“Just because you optimized your site for mobile a few years ago doesn’t mean it’s a good
mobile experience in 2018,” said Nowlen. “It’s worth checking in to see if your website is
following today’s standards and how better to do that.”
8. We Want Your Website To Look Good, Too:-

6. The takeaway message is: you and your developer are on the same team. Across the board,
our developers said that they valued the collaborative aspect of working with clients, and
that they took pride in making websites look great.
“The end product matters to us,” said Brynne Zdybel, an IntuitSolutions developer. “We
take pride in our work and it makes us happy to see that your site looks great and is
performing well.”
“It’s a team effort,” said Fitzsimons. “You are the expert on your business and we’re the
BigCommerce experts. We’re bringing our expertise together.”