8 Category Page Best Practices for eCommerce Sites

The category page, also known as the product listing page, is an important asset of an eCommerce store. Having a well-structured category page plays a prominent role in boosting sales and conversation.

Before having my calling for digital marketing, I used to work as a recruiter. I was switching positions in different IT staffing companies. I would say category pages are the face of your business. These are the strongest pages when it comes to user experience, search engine optimization and sales.

To skyrocket your sales, the layout, design, and structure of these pages need to be on point. Perhaps these best practices will help optimize your site’s category pages:

1: Keep a Faster Load Time

Everyone can agree on this that fast websites have their share in conversion optimization. Visitors don’t like to wait and if it’s more than 3 seconds, they simply close the window.

That’s the kind of impatient visitors we are dealing with here. A well-decorated product category page must load faster. Optimize the back end configurations and use speed optimization to reduce the load time. Test the speed of your pages on both desktop and mobile.

2: Use Consistent Product Images

Usually, a single product has multiple images. A visitor would like to see consistency in those images. It’s rather a design factor to improve the look and feel of the category page. And a consistent page is the one that shows similar products in a homogenous way.

You would see that the best eCommerce stores use a mix of images. It’s no harm in mixing images so long as the consistency factor is alive.

3: Choose Great Names

There is no need to be creative with the category names. Words like “live” and “discover” can be confusing when it comes to categories. Clever and fun categories names would be useless. What’s the point if the visitor isn’t able to find what they are looking for? Therefore, it’s best to use common words and phrases that are relevant to the user’s search.

4: Offer Visitors the Ability to Filter

A category page may have lots of extra information that the user may not need. Here, offering filters can help narrow down the options making the search results more manageable. Let’s suppose your category pages contain lots of dresses. Offer the visitor the opportunity to narrow down his options by price, size, color, length, and design.

Within just a few clicks, they will be looking at what they want. Filters help all sorts of customers find the options they want from the same category page.

5: Don’t Forget to Display Product Reviews

A good user experience creates a funnel pushing customers to navigate through your site and land on the products they want. It’s hard to predict what a customer wants when they visit a site. But you can make it easy for them by highlighting the top products or what they say “best sellers”.

Add genuine customer reviews and star ratings for extra credibility. This way, even if they came to your website to buy something else, they might develop an interest in the top-selling products. Keep in mind the products that have more than 50 reviews convert at a higher rate. This might be the exact push your customers need.

6: Never Hide the Price

The worst thing you can do is hiding the price of the products. Some eCommerce sites do this as a trick to make the customer click on a product that’s out of their price page. Let your customers sort out what they want. Make prices obvious. They won’t have to go through each item on your product page one by one to find the one their pocket can afford. Besides, customers never like a website that makes buying an item a fuss.

7: Make the Right Use of CTA

The call to action button plays a dual role on an eCommerce site. One – it guides customers on what action to take next. Two – it brings customers nearer to the conversion funnel.

A CTA that performs both these functions is always desirable. Don’t make the mistake of skipping the CTA buttons on the product category listing pages. I am sure customers know what they want to click on and how to add the product in the cart. You still need to have the CTA buttons in the right places.

8: Avoid These Common Mistakes

A lot of eCommerce businesses know what to do. But sometimes, they end up ignoring the don’ts such as:

• Long product description
• A poor mobile user experience
• Horizontal scrolling carousels
• Too many filers

Conclusion

Category page optimization can make or break your sales. Therefore, it’s imperative to conduct A/B tests and implement the strategy that brings the most sales. Remember there are no hard and fast rules. Adopt those best practices that meet your site’s needs the most.

On a side note, if you think your current SEO team may not have the right expertise to create category pages that convert, you can always reach out to a marketing staffing agency. They will find you a digital marketing expert and then you can kickstart your sales.