HTTP VS HTTPS

Very often we come across websites that have https added before the domain name instead of http. The extra ‘s’ indicates that the website is secure by having an added security layer called SSL or Secure Socket Layer. If you notice you would also see that there is a Padlock icon and a green bar that shows up.

So what is this SSL, why is it needed and who needs it? SSL is an extra layer of security that you can add to your website to safeguard your customers information that they submit on your website. It encrypts the customers data so if a hacker can somehow hack into your website he cannot make use of the customer and other data because it is in encrypted form.

With increasing security threats online concerning credit card theft, identity thefts etc., this is a must have if your website stores customer information and has ecommerce. Lately Google is also suggesting webmasters to have the SSL security for all types of websites and apparently is giving preference to sites that are more secure in ranking.

There are different types of SSL:

Extended Validation: This is for the highest level of security that you need and covers the standardized Extended Validation guidelines. Latest web browsers indicate the use of Extended Validations by turning the url address bar into green color and showing the company name. The company name shows because it is validated by Certification authorities who checks and validates all the details of the company.

Organization Validation: This is next level of security which also shows the company name and is validated by Certification authorities.

Domain Validations: This is the most basic and fastest way to get SSL as it is issued almost immediately without having to submit the company details. Since the company information is not validated it does not show the company name.

So to summarize, Secure Socket Layer helps websites in the following way:

• Makes them secure by encrypting information submitted on the website.
• Gives confidence to customers that their information will stay safe if they use the website. Especially where they have to use their credit cards. When you buy SSL you get a security icon that says your website is secure which you can prominently display on your website. Of course the URL also indicates that your site is safe with an added ‘s’ and the padlock icon.
• Search engines like Google are said to give more preference to secure sites that have ssl. 

Next steps after site launch

You have got a beautiful looking mobile responsive website made for your business that uses breathtaking parallex effects, amazing infographics and great content. After the site goes live, you share it on your facebook wall and text the link to your friends and family. But is that all? Having a site done will not get you business alone. Its like getting a Getting the site ready is just 50% of the work done. The pending 50% is done popularizing your website online by doing the following:

1) Publish content: Publish well written content in the form of blog posts, forum posts, articles and wikis. Create a blog on your site as well and publish there regularly. Google likes sites that publish fresh and original content. 

2) Ask for reviews: Ask your current and past customers to review your business, products and services online. Add a review and feedback section on your site where you can request your customers to rate your service or product on various parameters and write their comments. Make it a easy to fill form. Post the review on your site and other reviews website. 

3)  Get social: Publish new content in the form of helpful articles, offers, latest happenings, news etc on twitter, facebook etc., Make it interactive so that readers leave comment. 

4) Get news worthy: Publish press releases to formally intrdocue services, products and your company to the world. 

5) Get Videos: Videos that inform you cusstomers on how your products work or how a service solves a problem is a great way of marketing. You could have videos on any theme including help guides or trouble shooting videos for your products for which your customers contact you quiet often. You can post such videos on various free video publishing websites like vimeo, youtube etc.,

Defining your online mobile presence

More and more internet users these days use mobile devices for not only buying merchandise but also for planning vacations, booking tickets, paying bills,  buying products, checking emails, dating etc., Mobile devices gives the advantage of doing things when you are in transit or waiting or when you don't have access to PCs. For this reason, any online business - whether Local, Regional, National or International should should have a mobile web presence  in the form of a mobile site or an app and make use of all possible options to allow the online users to do most of the things  that they can do offline at their establishments or even more. For example some mobile sites and apps allow customers to pay in installments because their products are expensive and their target market are college students. The feature of easy installments gives them an advantage of a bigger customer base. The more you can add value to the online experience the higher conversion that helps in getting. 

Each business has a niche. Being aware of what your competition is important keeping your niche into perspective. An all rounder mobile strategy will help the business to get the maximum out of its niche through a mobile online presence.

At Vantagewebtech we provide ecommerce and mobile consultancy services to our customers that helps in taking their business to the next level. Contact Us today for a no obligation review of your business and quotation. 

Why You Need To Update Your Wordpress website regularly?

Now a day’s wordpress is most known CMS. At very earlier wordpress just known as a blogging system, but at present well known and used as a CMS with thousands of plugins and widgets. It is open source software that’s why people love to use it for creating websites. Updating wordpress to latest version is easy, you just need to click update button. With WordPress webstie you need to update three areas: the actual WordPress application, themes and plugins. But be careful, because sometime updates don’t go as well as planned. You need to restore previous version in such situation, so always keep backup before updating anything on your website.

Why it’s essential to update wordpress websites regularly?

Many business owner may think that why should they update their wordpress website when it is working fine. But think that you don’t have to do anything onerous, only a couple of minutes and few clicks of mouse are enough to keep your CMS up-to-date. New updates contain more efficient codes and features which will surely help you to improve the speed and performance of your site. It can also simplify the process/way you add data to your site. 

Advantages of updating website regularly

·         It makes websites more secure: Regularly updated sites can’t be hacked easily then compared to websites which are not upgraded. So it’s best to upgrade your WordPress website as soon as a security fix is released.

·         Compatibility with new plugins: Day by day wordpress community providing new plugins to its customers. If you are installing a brand new plugin, then you need to update wordpress version also because older version may not be compatible with new plugins and its features.

·         New Features: Each time wordpress provide any update, it means they are providing you new feature/shortcut to make your CMS easy for you. If you update wordpress website regularly then you can take benefit of these features.

If you want to add latest WordPress updates to your website contact us.

How to optimize your website landing page for better conversion rate

A landing page is where people end up after they click an ad. Website landing page experience affect conversion rate in several factors. The homepage of a website is not the only landing page; every page in your website may be landing page for specific keywords. Website’s conversion rate won't come from the new ad you create; it comes from the landing page you build. A well designed landing page can make website visitor to shop with you. Following tips can help you to optimize your website landing page:

·         Simple and Clean Design: Look and design of your website will have a huge impact on website visitor. Primary goal of landing page should be to make visitors satisfied and impress them with smart colors. Attractive images should be used to make landing page attractive. But keep in mind that simple and clean design will benefit you as it gives beautiful look to your landing page.

·         Appropriate Heading: Your landing page should have strong heading about what you offer.  It allows you to display key opportunity of your offer. Remember you have 6-8 seconds to convince visitors. So use heading and subheadings to promote your offer.

·         Make Landing Page Trustworthy: Use trust signals to indicate visitors that your product and brands are trustworthy. It can be done with testimonials, like counters from various social medial sites and secure payment options. You can also add logos of well known brands you’ve worked with, any certificate or award you have received and any group you are a member of etc.

·         Length of Forms: Short length forms are effective in a good landing page. Many of online customers like short length forms which contain very few fields to fill. I know as an online marketer you want to collect most of data from site visitors, but it’s important to keep these data forms short if you want to convert most of visitors into customers.

·         Match Landing Page with PPC ads: Make sure the words used in PPC ads, mostly matches with content of your landing page. It assures visitors that they are on right place. If you use PPC ads it’s important to drop your user directly to page they are looking for.  Example- If a user click on a PPC ad about men’s t-shirt, don’t drop them in men’s clothing section- you need to bring them exact desired location.

Designing the Perfect UX of Mobile Ecommerce in Few Simple Steps

Mobile phones are now an important part of our life. A huge crowd of people is using mobile phones to shopping online. If you are running an ecommerce store it’s important that your website design will work well with mobile and other small internet devices. Mobile shopping can be difficult because mobile screens are small, however you can make it possible to create a smooth and delightful shopping experience to your customers. The best shopping experiences are ones where products are shining through screen, designs are navigating and content are providing necessary information. Your website will be able to attract customer’s attention. Below are few tips to create a great mobile shopping experience.

Focus on product: Mobile shopping experience can be improved if your ecommerce website only focuses on products.  Excess navigation, excess promotions and excess content can irritate users. If you are using excess navigation then its waste of space. You need to allow user just shop, don’t over use promotional material and distract visitors.

Provide Quality Photos of Products: Maximum number of mobile phones have small screen resolution. Product photos should not be tinier as visitors wish to see products in detail. If photos are small then it will surely annoy visitors. Shopping on mobile is difficult but you can low difficult level by focusing on your products through big and quality photos.

Don’t Force Customers to Log In: In order to shop through mobile apps, user is often required to log in. It makes customers shopping experience bad and customers can also visit to your competitor website. Simply, don’t do this. Don’t force your customers to register and log in. Allow user to browse without logging in and checkout as guest.

Build Lightweight Website: Make your website lightweight and fast loading. Your customer will surely get convinced, if your website will load in 3-5 seconds. Visitors have come to shopping, and they are already convinced with site speed, so it makes them trust you and make shopping with you.

Design a clear basket and an easy checkout: Once someone decided to buy with, don’t let them change their decision because of poor checkout process. Make sure the process from adding products into cart, to confirmation of order, is seamless and awesome. Allow visitors to checkout as a guest. Things like meaningful flow, good copy writing, simple form design and privacy considerations can create a great checkout experience.

(Vantage Webtech)

How can you improve customer’s journey on your ecommerce website

Customer journey analysis is very important step to increase conversion rate of your ecommerce business. You need to understand customer’s pre- purchase behavior. Customer’s journey can be easy if you use advanced strategies and technologies to guide customer. You need to use filters, categories and site search option for customer’s comfort.

Following tips can help you improve customer’s journey on your ecommerce website:

·         Responsive Checkout: Your customers are on tablets, phones, laptops etc. and ready to make a purchase. Complicated checkout process can change your customers mind and make them purchase with other website that’s easier to navigate. So it’s compulsory to make your checkout process responsive and easy for your customers.  Shopify, an ecommerce company can provide you responsive platform to organize your products, customize storefront’s and accept payments from various payment methods.

·         Product Recommendations: Product recommendations are important, but to improve customer journey you need to suggest products which are closely related to customers purchase. For example: If your customer is shopping for shoes, then your recommendations should be socks, shoe polish kit, combo of socks pairs etc. The predictions should be on the basis of customer’s purchase history. It puts a positive impression on customers and makes their purchase journey short and easy. 

·         Self Service Support: Online customers like self service support then email or telephonic support. For an ecommerce store, this means offering detailed information about products on website. You need to provide product photos, technical product details and customers reviews to win customers confidence. Amazon, an ecommerce brand is a good example of self service support.

·         High Quality Content: Educate your customers with high quality content for products. Quality content doesn’t mean content marketing. High quality contents are those who can educate your customers about product detail and capture their attention. Informative and interesting content can force website visitors to make a purchase with you. 

(Vantage Webtech)

How to use Google my business for local seo

Google my business is a very fast and easy way for small businesses to make their online presence on Google. You can get your business page for free. You need to visit Google my business page and create a account there. At the end of the signup process, Google will verify your business using a 5-6 digit unique verification code. Google send this to you over the phone or via a postcard to confirm that you are owner of business. Once you’ve filled out your basic business info and been verified, Google my Business will add your company’s information to Google local search results. 

Google my business offers a lot of benefits to local businesses:

·         Create an online presence

·         Find new customers

·         Allow your current customers to find you online

·         Allow reviews from customers and you can respond them

·         Create a base of your local seo

Some important points to consider while creating Google my business page:

·         Enter your business address carefully

·         Use pictures & logo of your business

·         Enter accurate business information

·         Use good quotes to describe your business

·         Keep posting discounts and offers on your business page

·         Enter local area code carefully

If you want local search traffic, you need to make sure that you have completed all compulsory effort for that. Google my business can help you to make your online presence but there is more to do. You need to optimize website pages according to local seo techniques. Here are some of suggestions:

·         On-site: You should use your key location in various places on website such as content, meta heading and descriptions, title tags, footer etc.

·         Off-site: List your website on various local directories and portals.

·         Review: Ask customers for reviews on your Google business page. Because positive reviews can provide you huge benefit.

·         Share Content: At last continuously share useful content related to your products.

(Vantage Webtech)

Why typography is so important in web design?

Typography is known as an art and technique, which is used to arrange text on a website. You can say typography is a combination of font, size, spaces and color. Quality typography can increase written communication of your web page. Typography allows you to increase you conversion rate easily and impress website visitors with words & design. It is your duty to put maximum effort to complete the typographical points in your website designs.

 Tips to maintain good typography on a website:

·         Font Size: Small fonts are hard to read on lower resolution screens. Make sure you are using a font size that is easy to read on any screen resolution.

·         Titles and Subtitles: Use titles and sub headings for your content. It makes it easy to understand for visitors.

·         Avoid use of justified text as it can lead bad white spacing on your page.

·         Color: Use high contrast colors for text.

·         Length: A very long or short line may be distracting. For optimum readability you need to keep length of text between 40-80 characters, including spaces.

·         Simple: Use simple fonts on website if you are not much experienced in web design. Because only an expert web designer can use variety of fonts effectively.

Importance of typography in web design

Typography is very useful in web design; you can use it as a tool for improving users experience and usability of your website or either can allow them to focus on your content. Good typography design guides people and introduce your products/ service with amazing content on your website. Whenever people your website, there are chances they will immediately look at the text. That’s why it’s important to use good typography design techniques.

These reasons are why typography is so important. If text used in a design is too small, too cramped and it irritates the viewer, then definitely such kind of webpage won’t get a second chance to get attention of visitor.

(Vantage Webtech)

What is a well designed website and why it is importance for your business?

 Web design can be difficult as it’s not about how good it looks, but you should also make it easy to use. Websites that are not well designed and provide poor experience to user can hurt you with high bounce rate, low conversion rate and loss in business.  It’s important to understand the characteristics of good design that can make or break effectiveness of your online investment. Here are some key elements of a well designed website:

Visual Appearance: A good website must be visually professional, appealing and simple. Keep in mind, your website is reflecting your business, products and services. It may be your first impression on your customers. Your goal is to generate a positive impression and keep visitors on website. Good use of color, easy to read text and quality photography can make your website easy to navigate.

Typography: Text is most important element of your website. Remember that your audience is looking for information that will help them make a decision, so content on your website must be informative and relevant. It’s important to consider elements like font size, spacing, line length, font color, paragraphing etc.

Navigation: Every component of your website should work quickly and correctly. Your site must be easy to read, navigate and understand. Navigation means to direct user where you are now and where to go next.  Some key navigation element includes:

·         Keep your site simple and organized

·         Fast load pages

·         Create links to minimize need of page scroll

·         Use a consistent layout

·         Use long text along with links

Functionality: Make sure all component of your website is working properly because broken or poor constructed components can frustrate your visitors.  Everything should work properly including links, search box, forms etc.

Importance of well designed website

Website is now compulsory for every small to large businesses. A well designed website is known as a valuable investment.  Following are some advantages of having a well designed website:

·         Highlight your expertise with ease

·         Increase conversion rate

·         Benefit in seo

·         Reduce your maintenance time

·         Better first impression on visitors

·         Better way to  provide effective communication

·         Reduces other promotional cost

·         Provides time saving experience to customers

These are only few advantages we explain in this post, I am sure you could think of other advantages to a well designed site. Please feel free to suggest them in the comments below.

(Vantage Webtech)

How to improve conversions of your ecommerce site

One of the fastest ways any online store can increase revenue is to increase conversions rate of website.  Here are some tips on how you can improve conversion of an e-commerce website.

Make Your Website Homepage a Conversion Magnet: The homepage is like a store front and entry-point of your site. This is the area you exactly need to work because here you can convert visitors into buyers. Your visitors here will decide whether they continue to website or leave, their decision depends on how you welcome them. You can welcome visitor effectively if you:

·         Provide them search Box

·         Organize the navigation bar

·          Remember user search and provide related recommendations

·         Have an easy to use product categories group

·         Show discount offers clearly

Free Shipping: 70% of online buyers are looking for free shipping. Having a large shipping fee will definitely scare your customers and have a negative impact on your conversion rate. You should include shipping cost in price and offer your customers free delivery.

Easy to Navigate Product Page: Navigation should be descriptive. Mostly use generic labels and buttons, which can easily communicate with users. When your navigation shows featured products or discounted products, it gets user attention and forces them to make a purchase.

Limited Time Offers: You could offer limited-time discounts to encourage visitors to buy before the deal ends. Highlight the amount they will save by buying now, the time left before the deal expires, and the numbers of people who have already bought that deal to encourage them to click.

Offer Quick Delivery: Online customers are impatient. Long delivery time can make a negative impact on your conversion rate. Offer your customers quick delivery time to boost your conversion rate.

Trust Signals: Try to offer product quality and price guarantee for customers. Another way of generating trust is by adding secure payment options and show genuine reviews of your company.

Conversion rate of a website is hugely important because when you increase your conversion rate, it means you are increasing your revenue.

(Vantage Webtech)

What you need to know to attract more customers to your e-commerce website

As an on-line merchant, it is essential to make your E-commerce website attractive for customers. You won’t succeed unless you can attract customers to your E-commerce website. Acquiring customers for an on-line business may be difficult and time consuming process .Below we listed most effective ways to make it easy to gets lots of visitors.

Use a Responsive E-commerce Site: Now days, customers are using mobiles, tablets, iphones etc. for on-line shopping. You need to reach your customers on all devices, if you don’t then you are losing customers and that means low ROI.  You can also provide them mobile app to feel them comfortable with you. If you are using responsive website, it will also reduces your bounce rate and benefit you with high search engine ranking. Make sure you are using a website design which can be easily accessed from all these devices.

Make Your Website Beautiful: Your website is like a representation of your business and products. That’s why it has to be beautiful and professional if you really want to attract customers. You have to be aware that a user’s purchase decision is usually made just within first 5 second on your website. So make your store beautiful and easy to use as a beautiful store is always considered more reliable and trustworthy.

Post Regularly On Social Media Channels: Social media channels are one of free promotion tools. Post regularly on your social accounts it can increase your brand value among customers.  So, social media is a great marketing channel at no financial expense.

·         Facebook: May be your customer’s want you follow on facebook. You should create your business page on facebook, engage customers and catch their attention.

·         Google Plus: Create a google plus page for your business it’s free.

·         Twitter: Start twitting on twitter. Its simplicity makes it one of most effective ways to engage with your targeted audience. You can also use twitter card for advertising purpose.

·         LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the office block of internet. After setup your business profile on LinkedIn, you have an opportunity to make a link with other companies, suppliers, related websites and people.

·         Pinterest: Create a pinterest page and enable rich pins to your account.

·         Blogger: Use blogging as a brand awareness tool. It can provide you quality back links and targeted traffic.

Prepare Email List For Marketing: Building up an email list for marketing is important. It is effective solution to attract customers and make repeat sales from your customers. Some of most common email ideas are:

·         Emails about new products

·         Mails about promos and offers

·         Recommend similar product after customer made a purchase

·         Send email to those client’s who haven’t been active since a long while with discount coupons to  make them revisit your website

You don’t just need traffic. You need visitors that convert into customers and subscribers. An email list will help you achieve that and allow you to work on your subscribers and drive sales with them.

Huge traffic generation is a continuous struggle for most E-commerce websites. You cannot simply rely on SEO and then sit back and wait for results. You need to create high quality content about products and offer discounts and promos to attract new visitors, convert them into email subscribers and then into paid customers.

(Vantage Webtech)