Why Drupal Commerce is a best fit for your E-commerce business
Emerging technologies have changed the perspective of E-commerce businesses. With e-commerce on an enormous rise, many e-commerce platforms are frequently released into the market. E-commerce sites are always in demand for scalable as well as flexible business operations. An e-commerce platform must enable businesses to manage an optimized website capable of handling the high demand for security, integration with third-party tools, and time-to-market standards with fewer development costs.
Successful e-commerce is not just about selling your products online. It includes managing your data as well as client interaction across several platforms. So, if you own an e-commerce store, then you must choose a platform that can handle both content and commerce.
When you research e-commerce, you might come across an e-commerce platform called Drupal. It’s not a big surprise that many e-commerce firms implement Drupal Commerce for their e-stores.
Drupal Commerce is the most preferred e-commerce solution, which provides a powerful set of modules to meet e-commerce requirements and is chosen to build online stores for every kind of business.
Why Drupal Commerce might be the right choice for your Business?
Drupal Commerce is the most comprehensive open-source e-commerce platform, integrating commerce, content, and community to build engaging web experiences that bring online merchants more sales and revenue.
With Drupal Commerce, we can integrate digital content such as blogs, videos, and editorial content without any need for separate research and the checkout experience. Hence, this provides improved online sales along with better user experience and increased traffic.
E-commerce businesses always need a platform where CMS and e-commerce are on equal footing. For this reason, the majority of online store owners choose Drupal Commerce as their e-commerce solution, as it has several benefits which are discussed below :
- Integrated CMS and Marketing Platform:
Drupal Commerce is combined into Drupal at the core level and takes advantage of all the power Drupal has to offer. This assures customers have a seamless experience while using the website.
It has the flexibility to integrate third-party features such as management systems, social media buttons, payment gateways, Google Adwords, live chat, customer service management tools, and many others.
Drupal now comes with an apt framework that can be integrated with any existing frontend software systems to alter the website as per your needs.
- Security:
With an increase in cases of Hackers and security breaches, basic do-it-yourself security practices are not enough. These cases affect your brand image and online sales drastically.
With strong Drupal community support, Drupal is verified and tested consistently for any issues and vulnerabilities. The security team of Drupal releases constantly updates the community for any security announcements and provides modules to allow Tier-A security to site owners and module developers.
- Maintenance Costs:
Drupal is open-source, which is always free to use. Initially, you only have to pay for hosting fees, whereas in WordPress and Magento, you have to additionally pay for premium plugins or modules apart from Hosting charges.
- Easy to Customize:
Drupal Commerce is completely customizable. We can easily modify anything from the front-end to the back-end, including product appearance, shopping cart block, contact forms, checkout pages, and many more. With minor changes in design work, you can alter the look and feel of a Drupal e-commerce website. Additionally, these free and paid themes provide you with a lot of great options to choose from.
- Multiple Language Support:
With multiple language support, Drupal Commerce can help you reach a global audience. This marketing opportunity should never be missed by any e-commerce business. People prefer their native language the most while shopping online. Even if your enterprise might be widely popular but nothing can beat the familiarity of a regional language. This is how personalization matters.
- Mobile Responsiveness:
From a study, it was found that nearly half of the traffic to e-commerce websites comes from mobile. This is the reason why online businesses take mobile device usage very seriously.
Modifying your website to a responsive design will increase traffic and lead to more conversions. The latest version of Drupal comes with predefined themes and an admin interface that are device-responsive.
- Speed:
For every online business, the speed of your website matters a lot. A slow-loading website is detrimental, and it can degrade your efforts and investments.
As e-commerce websites are built with a lot of graphics and videos, performing image, CSS, JS compression, and basic theme improvisation can help a lot in improving website load time.
- SEO Supported:
Every e-commerce website needs SEO to increase conversions. These websites are loaded with huge data. For a customer, it might be easy to navigate an SEO friendly website, but for business owners, it is a hectic task to implement SEO and index every product page.
Drupal consists of modules that help to improve SEO, such as Robots.txt, which informs the search engine which pages to crawl and index. Alongside, Drupal has other modules such as Path Auto, XML sitemap, and meta tag, which can enhance the SEO of your website.
Conclusion:
Drupal Commerce is one of the robust E-commerce tools that allows you to scale and grow your e-commerce site. It’s the capability to integrate and provide business owners with extensive analytics that makes it a growth-friendly option. Drupal provides better control with flexible software that can be customized to the needs of the business. It is considered to be a rapidly growing e-commerce solution across the world.
If you’re building your e-commerce store or planning to migrate your store, we at emunications will assist you with Drupal development services. Contact Your Houston Website Designer & Developer
Drupal Dashboards
Dashboards!
Dashboards are user control panels installed on a site to help the user easily edit and maintain their site with little to no knowledge of web programming. We can create these dashboards for our clients using the content management system known as “Drupal”. With the combination of our programming expertise and Drupal, we can deliver an easy-to-use user control panel or “Dashboard” to our clients so that they can modify the content of their site without needing eMUNICATIONS to make the changes for them, thus saving our clients money and time.
With this dashboard, you can manage everything pertaining to your website: online calendars, email blasts, email newsletters, all done with the ease of submission forms and in real time.
Contact your Houston area Drupal experts today for an introduction to the world of dashboards.
Tips to Image SEO – Optimize Images for Search Engines
Image Optimization is the basic step for your SEO campaign. As the Search Engines are getting smarter and more intelligent, the process of achieving a good search ranking is getting more complex.
Now it takes much more than just quality content to get to the top.
Many factors contribute to showing up well in search engine rankings, one of the most important of them is on-page optimization. On-page optimization is the pillar of your SEO, and one of the important on-page optimization factors is image optimization.
Images make your webpages more appealing.
More likely than not, there’s an image on every page of your website. Without the proper optimization, however, you’re wasting a valuable SEO asset. Plus, the larger the file size, the longer it takes your page to load, and the higher your bounce rate will be.
Image optimization creates many advantages for your image assets, including better user experience, faster page load times, and additional ranking opportunities, both within the traditional and image search results.
Although visual search technology has made great strides of late, search engine bots are unable to identify the content of an image; they rely on the text associated with the images to fully understand what the image is and how it relates to your content or the topic of your page.
But which factors are most important to ensure your images are findable and don’t slow down your site?
To help you ensure you’re optimizing your images properly, here are six basic tips to get you off to a great start
Optimizing Your Images for SEO and Speed:
Speed plays an important role in SEO and user experience. Search engines consistently rank fast websites higher. This is also true for the image search.
Images increase your overall page load time. They take longer to download than text, which means your page loads more slowly if there are several large image files to download.
You need to make sure that images on your site are optimized for the web. This can be a little tricky to get used to since many beginners are not experts in graphics and image editing.
The best way to optimize images is by editing them on your computer using photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop. This allows you to choose the right file format to create a small file size.
Alt Tag:
The Alt tag is probably the most important image optimization factor. Alt stands for alternate. The text in the alt tag is displayed in place of the image if the image can not be shown or is taking too long to load.
Most of the major search engines are text-based, i.e they can not read images and videos. The location of your images appears as an empty space to the search engines. These empty spaces are not in any way good for your overall SEO. The alt tag not only tells the search engines that there is an image placed here but also informs it about the topic of your image.
Use Original, High-Quality Images:
The more original pictures you have, the better the experience for the user and the better your odds are of ranking on relevant searches.
Original images can be made by a designer at your company (e.g., data visualizations, infographics) or taken in-house using a quality camera.
Give your customers a glimpse of your company, or provide a high-quality product image that your visitors will respond to.
Many users ignore stock photos. High-quality original images allow you to stand out in the search results, so show your brand’s personality and attract more people to your website.
JPEG Best Practices:
A JPEG image provides the best options for maintaining a quality image when compressed or resized. They work with many colors, shadows, and patterns to display a high-resolution image, and is the most popular photo type in the digital space.
Due to its ability to be compressed considerably, the JPEG forms quality images in small file sizes.
One downside of JPEGs: it uses lossy data compression. This means that the image quality can suffer depending on your settings. There is also no support for transparent backgrounds like there is with GIF and PNG formats.
PNG Best Practices:
A PNG image is typically used when editing or downloading files from Adobe Photoshop. PNG is known to handle transparency, and is often used for logo image assets as the image appears small, yet the resolution is high quality.
PNGs can be saved as a PNG-8 or a PNG-24. The PNG-8 file type is limited to a palette of 256 colors, whereas the PNG-24 will deliver a much higher quality display, but result in a larger file size, which could disrupt the page’s performance.
Use a meaningful Image Filename:
Just as keywords are important in the URL, the same goes for images. Keyword-rich file names can help an SE determine relevancy. Avoid using default image file names like “DSC0019.jpg” as it does not give much information about the image. Use descriptive filenames with keywords separated by “-” (hyphen).
Create an Image Sitemap:
Create and publish an image sitemap to house all of your images in one place. This gives Google and other search engines more ability to discover the images on your site, increasing the likelihood that your images will be displayed in Image Search results.
OpenGraph and Twitter Cards:
If you’re providing valuable content and information to your audience, they will share the content on social media. From Facebook to Twitter, content is shared and links are distributed.
If you add the following image tag to the section in your page HTML, like this:
<meta property=”og:image” content=””
For OG tags, you can set the image you want within WordPress, but also create your meta property in HTML. Add the tag to the section of your page, so it looks like above
Conclusion:
Following these tips should increase interaction and engagement with your images, reduce page load speed, improve findability in image search results, and strengthen your keyword performance.
The most important thing is to make sure the image and alternative text are relevant to the page. Other key takeaways:
- Reduce file size for faster page load speed.
- JPEGs are generally the best option for website photos.
- Never use GIFs for large product images.
- Improve stock images with tools like Canva.
- Do not overstuff keywords in the alt text; make sure it describes the photo.
- Make sure the image is relative to the page.
- For crawlability, create an image sitemap.
- Create OG and Twitter Cards for social shares.
