I’m really happy to say that Ultimento has become Noam Design‘s flagship product! The fastest loading Magento theme on the planet is also the fastest growing eCommerce product on the market . With new features and exciting improvements literally every couple of weeks!

We released Ultimento 1.3.1 a few days ago and here are the highlights for this minor release:

Improved social sharing

We improved the social sharing options on the product view page! We added a “share on Facebook” option and we’re using small icons for the 3 sharing options:

1. Email to a friend
2. Tweet
3. Share on Facebook

Now the trick about social sharing and bookmarking options is that they usually decrease conversion rates from the product view page and increase the page’s load time as well. That’s bad. Especially for speed and conversion fanatics like us .

What’s the problem with social sharing and bookmarking on eCommerce sites?

I’ve seen many stores that include all possible social sharing and bookmarking options to their pages, just to add yet one more feature. That’s not a good practice. Research clearly shows that too many of these options will significantly decrease your store conversion rates (mainly because you’re adding distractions). In addition most social bookmarking and sharing widgets will significantly slow down our page.

You may increase traffic to your site but if that traffic doesn’t eventually convert, then you’re simply increasing the load on your server – ultimately increasing your costs and lowering your profits!

When can your store benefit from social sharing and bookmarking options?

A better practice is to choose a few bookmarking and sharing options and to follow these 3 guidelines:

1. These options (social networks) are shown to bring quality traffic that has a good chance of eventually converting and/or improving your store’s SEO. In my opinion Twitter and Facebook really are the only ones that fit the bill when it comes to eCommerce, in addition to the “email to a friend” native Magento feature.

2. The design is thoroughly tested to not interfere with conversions and user retention. In the case of Ultimento, after many design variations and A LOT of testing, we were able to achieve an increase in conversion and user retention rates, just from having the sharing and bookmarking options there.

3. Your implementation doesn’t affect the web page’s load time. Basically that means that you shouldn’t use any widget because they load many additional files (including JavaScript files, CSS files, and images), and many also rely on external sites that may be processing requests very slowly. What we did for Ultimento 1.3.1 is add the icons we use combined with the single background image that’s already loaded on the page, and write the code ourselves for the bookmarking/sharing options – always using Magento’s native functions for optimum performance.

Other improvements in Ultimento 1.3.1

We improved the theme’s upgrade-ability and fall-back  functionality, fixed a few minor issues that customers reported to us, worked a little bit more on the blue and white color schemes that are included in Ultimento, and more!

As always the update is FREE to all customers. If you don’t already own Ultimento – now is the time to choose your package .

Hey – don’t stop here

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