How to optimise your e-commerce website
Grow London Local
Posted: Mon 14th Sep 2026
Getting people to visit an online shop takes work.
Once they're there, the website has another job to do – help them find what they want, answer the questions holding them back and make buying straightforward.
Small problems can get in the way surprisingly quickly, like a page taking too long to load or a delivery charge appearing late in the checkout.
Website optimisation is the ongoing process of finding those problems and improving how your online store performs.
What does it mean to optimise an e-commerce website?
Website design usually deals with how a site is structured, presented and built. Optimisation continues once that site is in use.
It involves studying what visitors do, finding places where they struggle or leave and making changes based on that information.
For an e-commerce business, that could mean:
Speeding up product pages.
Making categories easier to navigate.
Rewriting unclear product information.
Improving search and filtering.
Simplifying the checkout process.
Making the mobile experience easier to use.
Helping search engines understand your pages.
Testing different layouts, images or calls to action.
The customer journey provides a useful way to think about the process.
Someone may arrive through Google, Instagram, an ad, an email or a recommendation.
They then need to understand what you sell, find a suitable product, decide whether they trust the business and complete their purchase.
Each stage gives you something to examine and improve.
Start with website speed
A slow online shop can become frustrating long before someone reaches the checkout.
Large images are a common cause. E-commerce websites often rely heavily on photography, but uploading enormous image files straight from a camera or design programme can add unnecessary weight to a page.
Get around this by compressing images before you upload them, and use modern file formats (like WebP, for example) wherever you can.
Check whether your website automatically resizes images for different screens.
Other common causes of poor performance include excessive apps, plug-ins, tracking scripts and elaborate page effects. Many are added for a useful reason and then neglected.
Tools such as Google's PageSpeed Insights can test individual pages and highlight any technical issues that are affecting the site's speed. Your e-commerce platform may also provide its own information on performance.
Don't test only your homepage. Look at your busiest product pages, category pages and checkout journey too.
And check from a phone. A website that feels quick on Wi-Fi may behave differently for someone browsing on a mobile connection while travelling across London.
Make products easy to find
A website's navigation tends to become untidy as an online business adds products.
Look at the structure from a customer's point of view. Someone who knows little about what you sell should still be able to work out where to go.
Category names should use words customers understand.
Search should cope with the terms people commonly use for your products.
Filters can become particularly valuable when customers need to narrow products by size, colour, price, material or another important feature.
Your website analytics can uncover useful clues. Look at which pages people visit after landing on your site and where they leave.
Also pay attention to your site's own search data if your platform provides it.
Repeated searches can expose gaps in navigation or product naming. If lots of visitors type "gift cards" into your search box, for example, you may want to make gift cards easier to find.
Give product pages enough information to do their job
Strong product pages answer the questions customers ask before deciding to buy.
Depending on what you sell, that might include:
Dimensions.
Materials.
Ingredients.
Care instructions.
Delivery times.
What comes in the box.
Specific language is useful here. "Premium quality material" tells someone very little. Naming the material and explaining its relevant characteristics gives them something they can use.
Product photography deserves similar attention. Show the item clearly and include extra views where they help someone make a decision.
Reviews and customer questions can also tell you what your product page is missing. If buyers repeatedly ask for the same piece of information, add it to the page.
Treat mobile as a regular part of your checks
Don't assume that a responsive website is automatically pleasant to shop on. Use your store regularly on an actual phone.
Open the menu and search for a product. Choose a variation, then add it to your basket. Enter a discount code. Go as far through checkout as you reasonably can.
Look for anything that requires fiddly tapping, excessive scrolling or zooming. And pay particular attention to:
Text size and readability.
Buttons and links.
Menus and filters.
Image galleries.
Forms.
Pop-ups.
Payment screens.
Analytics can help you compare performance across devices. If mobile visitors buy at a noticeably lower rate, investigate the pages where they tend to leave.
Remove friction from checkout
By the time someone reaches checkout, you've already done much of the hard work. Don't create new reasons for them to abandon the purchase.
Go through your own checkout occasionally and count how much information you're asking for.
Some information is essential for payment, delivery or legal reasons. Other fields, you may have added because they seemed useful at the time.
Offer guest checkout if your platform and business model allows it. Customers who simply want to place an order may have little interest in creating an account first.
Make delivery information easy to understand. Unexpected costs appearing late in the process can cause people to reconsider a purchase.
Payment options are crucial as well. The right options depend on your customers, your products and the payment services your platform supports. Review your payment data periodically rather than adding every available method.
And always test the whole process after you've made significant changes.
Decide what you're trying to improve
Website optimisation becomes easier when you choose a few useful measures. For an e-commerce business, these might include:
Conversion rate: the proportion of visitors who complete a purchase.
Average order value: the average amount spent per transaction.
Cart abandonment rate: how often baskets are created without becoming orders.
Checkout completion rate: how many people who start checkout finish it.
Product-page conversion: how individual products turn visits into sales.
Choose measures that connect to a genuine business objective.
If you're getting plenty of visitors but few orders, you might focus on conversion. If you're already converting well, you may want customers to buy slightly more with each order.
Write down your starting figures before changing anything. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to judge whether an improvement worked.
Use analytics to understand what people actually do
Most e-commerce platforms provide some built-in reporting. Google Analytics is another widely used option for studying website traffic and customer journeys.
Start with simple questions, like:
Which pages attract the most visitors?
Which products sell well?
Where do people commonly leave?
Which marketing channels produce customers?
How does behaviour differ between desktop and mobile?
Heatmapping tools such as Microsoft Clarity and Contentsquare (formerly Hotjar) can add another layer of information. They can show where visitors click, how far they scroll and how they move through pages.
Use these tools carefully if they collect information about visitors. Check their privacy settings and make sure your use of analytics, cookies and personal data is within data protection rules.
Build a manageable routine for optimisation
You don't need to watch website statistics every morning. A simple review every month may be enough for many smaller businesses.
Check your main commercial figures first. Look for unusual changes in conversion, checkout completion, sales or traffic. Then examine the pages most closely connected to those changes.
Make one or two alterations where you have a reasonable basis for doing so. And keep a simple record of what you changed and when.
It could be a spreadsheet containing the page, problem, change, date and result. That gives you a useful history as the site develops.
Prioritise work that could affect sales
Website optimisation can produce an endless list of possible jobs. So, a useful way to prioritise is to consider three things:
How many customers encounter the problem.
How serious it is for them.
How much work fixing it requires.
Start with obvious barriers in heavily used parts of your site.
You might discover through analytics that 40% of visitors reach a particular category page, for example. Improving that page may deserve more attention than redesigning a rarely visited section.
Customer complaints can help you prioritise too. Several people raising the same issue usually deserves investigation.
Test changes instead of relying on preference
People involved in a business tend to develop strong opinions about their own website.
Customers aren't involved in those discussions. Their behaviour gives you another source of evidence.
Try testing significant changes where your traffic levels and technology make that practical. A/B testing tools can show different versions of a page to different visitors and compare the results.
You could test a product image, headline, page layout or call-to-action wording.
As a smaller business, you may not have enough traffic to produce reliable A/B test results quickly. You can still make informed changes using analytics, customer feedback and usability testing.
Ask someone unfamiliar with the website to complete a simple task while you watch. Give them something specific such as "find a birthday present under £40 and get as far as checkout".
Don't guide them through it. Notice where they hesitate.
Five minutes of watching someone use your store can expose issues you've stopped seeing yourself.
Use SEO and performance tools to find hidden problems
Search engine optimisation (SEO) helps your product and category pages appear when people search for relevant products.
Google Search Console can show the search terms that bring people to your site, which pages receive clicks and whether Google has encountered indexing problems.
SEO tools can also identify missing page titles, broken links and other technical issues. Some e-commerce platforms include these checks or provide apps and plug-ins that handle them.
Product names and descriptions should use the language customers are likely to search for naturally. Avoid filling pages with repeated keywords. Useful, specific information serves customers and gives search engines more context.
For London businesses serving a local market, location may also be relevant. Make addresses, collection options and delivery areas clear where they affect the buying decision.
Use automation where it solves a useful problem
E-commerce platforms now offer large libraries of apps, integrations and automation tools.
Some can recover abandoned baskets by sending reminders. Others recommend related products, automate emails, manage inventory or personalise parts of the shopping experience.
Choose these tools because you've identified a specific use for them.
Every integration you add brings a cost of some kind. There may be a monthly fee, additional data collection, extra maintenance or an effect on website speed.
Once you've installed an app, review it every so often. Remove anything you've stopped using and check whether several tools are performing overlapping jobs.
The features already included in your e-commerce platform may cover more than you realise.
Optimising your website as the business grows
A growing online shop creates new questions.
You may want to increase average order value by introducing bundles, related-product recommendations or a sensible qualifying point for free delivery.
Cart abandonment data may show it's worth changing delivery information or your checkout process.
Search behaviour might reveal demand for products you don't currently stock.
Repeat purchase data can help shape your email marketing or loyalty activity.
And as order volumes increase, your website data becomes useful outside marketing. It can influence your stock planning, product development, customer service and decisions about where to spend money.
Keep returning to the experience of buying from your store. Check it yourself, watch the numbers, listen to customers and fix the parts that are causing trouble.
Over time, those small decisions can produce a website that is easier to use and better at turning interest into orders.
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