Omnichannel customers are more active and are quickly migrating to mobile platforms to shop online. This is a growing trend for shoppers online, and the most sure-fire way to retain customers in businesses' mobile sites and drive sales is to make sure that your web store loads quickly for all devices.

Slow pages, according to Web Performance Today, is the top complaint when it comes to mobile shoppers abandoning their shopping carts on web stores. Shoppers who are faced with web stores that load too slowly for wireless browsing turn to competitors 43% of the time.

Mobile shoppers also abandon their shopping carts 97% of the time; they do this when they are done browsing web stores from their mobile devices, and compared to desktop online shoppers who abandon their carts 70-75% of the time. Businesses need to optimize their mobile sites more to drive more sales.

A few ways to optimize your mobile site

Contemporary web design trends now require that web sites are responsive, creating a seamless browsing experience for mobile users. This holds true to mobile shopping as well. About 55% of all time spent on online web stores are done from mobile devices, businesses need to adopt mobile-friendly eCommerce standards in order to capture the fast-growing mobile shopper market.

• Simplify the mobile version of the site - Web Performance Todayindicates that on average, mobile websites take 4.33 seconds to load. This is below par in comparison to mobile shoppers' expectations, with loading periods under 4 seconds. Simplifying is hard to do while taking into consideration the amount of content you also have to display in the desktop version—you would want to take advantage of both shopping platforms. 
  Planning your content and layout design is essential in order to keep things intact when either the desktop or mobile versions of your site is loaded. By planning everything, you reduce the risk of your site's mobile version breaking or loading slowly - immediately turning off shoppers and driving them to your competitors.
• • Take advantage of modern web technologies - Practical eCommerce relates that responsive design provides better mobile user experiences. It is a must in order to compete for shoppers' attention against other ecommerce sites. More importantly, having a responsive design easily loads your site faster, and you no longer need to create a separate mobile version of your site. Web components that aid you in creating a responsive design include parameters so that it adjusts your web site to the size of the device trying to load it. With the growing number of mobile devices being introduced to the market, it is necessary to use web technologies that make your web store responsive to any mobile device.
• • Reduce the size of web store images - Understandably, web stores showcasing products house a whole lot of product images. While developing your web store, Practicalecommerce.com suggests that you manage rich media assets such as images, in a way that makes them fast and easy to load on smartphones and other mobile devices. A sure way to accomplish this is to reduce the file sizes of your images. A right balance of compressed file size and the required image quality is necessary. Since you need to have both a desktop and mobile ecommerce site to capture both shopper markets, you need to maintain the balance between file size and image quality.

These are only few of the ways to optimize your ecommerce web site for mobile users, but you can be sure to capitalize on the increase of site traffic and engagement from your web store customers. This way, you can capture the always-shifting buying journey of your omnichannel customers.

Connected Business eCommerce is a robust eCommerce module and a default web store that applies responsive design. You can also check our web design services to greatly improve your web store design and performance.