8 Effective Website Goals for Ecommerce Businesses (2024)

The menswear brand Belstaff has been in business for more than a century. Naturally, its business goals and objectives have gradually changed with the times—the internet didn’t even exist when the company first opened. Just as Belstaff’s storefronts have had to adapt to changing customer expectations, the brand’s web presence has had to evolve as well.

“A website is not one of those things where you design [it once] and you’re done,” says former chief brand officer Jody Harrison on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “We’re continually having to feed and evolve and update and tweak. Our road map is never-ending in that regard.”

The online success of any ecommerce business—100 years old or otherwise—depends entirely on how well you engage your target audience and convert them into paying customers. The question is, how do you do this better and more consistently? Whether you want to bring a legacy brand into the modern era or launch an entirely new enterprise, discover which website goals to focus on so your site can advance your larger business goals.

Ecommerce website goals

Here are SMART website goals (meaning specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) to consider weaving into your ecommerce business strategy:

Increase your site traffic

This goal raises the raw number of website visitors and ideally increases the right kind of visitors—those most likely to convert into customers.

First, gauge the current status of unique visitor traffic and track it over time. Then quantify a target for increasing website traffic.

How to get there? There are many approaches. Arguably the most important: Improve search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the art of packaging keywords, meta descriptions, freshly updated website content, and strong backlinks. Together, it can help boost rankings in search results on popular search engines like Google. The higher your website ranks in the search engine, the more traffic you’ll gain. You can use a tool like Semrush to track your site’s rankings and identify keywords and top competitors.

You can also add more timely information through blog posts, increase social media activity, and work toward the goal of growing your number of email subscribers.

Lower your bounce rate

A website’s bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors landing on a page who leave without clicking anything. Typical bounce rates for ecommerce sites range between 20% to 40%.

To reduce bounce rate, study how long site visitors stick around once they land on a page. You can do this with tools like Google Analytics. Look for patterns. Do bounces correlate with device type or geography? For example, if mobile devices are bouncing at a high rate, test the mobile browsing experience and improve the layout and responsiveness of landing pages accordingly.

Improve your website’s conversion rate

Conversion rate measures how successfully your website converts visitors into performing an action, like buying something or subscribing to your email list.

Calculate your sales conversion rate with a simple formula: Divide the number of paying customers by the total number of visitors in a given period and multiply by 100. Once you have established a baseline conversion rate, you can track it. Look for patterns such as seasonal ebbs and flows.

A good ecommerce conversion rate is more than 3.2%. If your rate is low, determine the pain points where customers are abandoning the journey, and fix those aspects of website design. For example, add more calls to action (CTAs) on the homepage and blog posts.

Decrease the cart abandonment rate

According to the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is 70%.

The highest-ranking reasons for abandonment are:

• High shipping costs
• Taxes and fees
• Forcing a visitor to create an account
• Lack of trust in credit card transactions
• Slow delivery times
• A complicated checkout sales process

Analyze where your website might be contributing to the abandonment problem and make adjustments. For example, you could add a guest checkout, so customers don’t need to create an account to make a purchase. Alternatively, you could incentivise the customer by offering free shipping or a discount on their first purchase.

🌟If you’re missing out on ecommerce sales, here’s how to recoup abandoned shopping carts and make more revenue.

Improve customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is tied to the quality of user experience (UX) on the website. The best user experiences feature attractive, intuitive interfaces, logically arranged page content, easy navigation, and an easy checkout process.

Improving customer satisfaction may require several fixes, including a website redesign. Using a more attractive theme and template with minimal fonts and well-matched colors can make a big difference.

Jodie Harrison says Belstaff’s partnership with Shopify helped the brand meet its goals of both improving client satisfaction and fostering a more integrated customer experience.

“It was really key to ensure that when customers come to Belsaff.com they’re getting the same feeling across all different touch points,” she says. “When they go into a store, they get the same level of attention and service. When they go online, they get the same level of frictionlessness. They can find what they want. It’s really easy to navigate. It’s compelling. It’s got engaging, bespoke content modules that I absolutely loved working on.”

Grow more qualified leads

This goal positions your website as a lead-generation tool. One way to increase the number of leads is to analyze website stats and identify the most visited pages, then add contact form submissions there.

Without a clear content marketing strategy, it’s unlikely that more leads will be generated consistently. Look for opportunities to build brand presence by becoming an expert in the field. Offer written and video content establishing credibility. Then you can gate some exclusive content for leads who sign up.

Another strategy is to increase your presence on social media platforms. To attract more monthly qualified leads to your website, be more visible by posting frequently, and cultivate audience engagement by offering livestreams, polls, and Q&A sessions. 

Increase email subscribers

Many businesses depend on email subscriber lists to drive traffic to the website. Analyze how subscribers are responding to email marketing, which can tell you which messaging is most successful.

The goal of increasing email subscribers can be accomplished through CTAs on the website itself. Offer incentives for subscribing, like discounts or added-value content. Opportunities to sign up should be peppered throughout the site.

Reduce your website management costs 

Yesterday’s business technology can become outdated and expensive to maintain—especially when business goals shift over time. It can be costly to maintain the connections between the company website and other pieces of technology used to run the business. This website objective will track the costs in labor time and dollar amount spent on operating the website.

For example, when Belstaff overhauled its business technologies to raise efficiencies and reduce costs, the switch to the Shopify platform made the adjustments easier.

“The omnichannel features, for example, have been really helpful,” says Navid Jilow, Belstaff’s director of technology on Shopify Masters. “You can have an architecture where an order management system is sitting in between your ecommerce platform and your [enterprise resources planning] ERP platform.”

In this way, Belstaff was able to achieve its goal of reducing website management costs.