CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2031

10-Minute Teardown for ClubRideApparel.com

August 18, 2020

Hello -

A lot of you gave some GREAT feedback last week on the new format. I really appreciate it and we’ll continue. I like it because it lets you all see real websites — some of the top Shopify websites in the world. So, you get to see what they’re doing right and wrong and make informed decisions for yourselves. Win-Win.

If you didn’t send me a note last week, go ahead and reply to this email and let me know how you like everything.

Let’s meet this week’s teardown target.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: ClubRideApparel.com

Company Profile

ClubRideApparel is an eCommerce site focused on clothing and gear for bike trail riding and other outdoor sports. They are a top 1000 Shopify site and a top 100k website overall — and that means that they do good business.

The Good

The website has a good design that is spot-on brand. The home page makes exceptional use of Lifestyle imagery and video clips (but those videos come at a cost, which we’ll discuss later).

The top menu organization is solid with products first! This can be a miss for a lot of sites who try to sell their story first. Story is important, products a more important.

Their content is great. Real articles by real people talking about things that not only are of interest to their well-targeted audience but that deliver great SEO value too.

Solid subscription discount offer as a delayed interstitial to collect email addresses — mission-critical to capture more holiday sales!

Holy crap Batman! These guys use Image ALT tags! They could be better, but hey … I’ll take it. Good job. They also have good risk-reversal with trust badges and payment options. Whoever is in charge of their marketing seems to have a handle on things.

The Bad

So … this is a bit problematic. The images and videos look great … once they load. Page speed is pretty bad. Their ratios and numbers are WAY off. A good bit of that is just them trying to look so good. And we get it. There are certain things that are a trade-off between speed and marketing impact. The images and videos can be better optimized, but even if I give them a pass on those items in exchange for it looking so good, there are issues behind the scenes that they are just missing. Things that can be fixed fairly easily.

For example, they do not properly del=ploy browser caching. That means that their return customers have to wait over and over and over again for the same images to load and that’s just not necessary. And they are running JavaScript calls ahead of visual items so customers have to wait to see and use the site while the invisible backend code runs. These are two examples of things that are easily fixed by our team every single day.

The Ugly

Nope. These guys are doing such a good job overall, they get a pass on the ugly stuff.

Sponsored

If you need help making Shopify website tweaks or fixing those little nagging things on your Shopify store, let’s get stuff done.

.

Share the Love

Sharing is good, and it's time for you to share your favorite Shopify newsletter. How about you forward this email to a worthy entrepreneur right now – just

and share the love.

And if you're lucky enough to have a friend who shared this awesome email with you, Welcome!

for yourself. You’ll be glad that you did.