Canelis - high quality catfood

[Manisch]

hello there,

so nobody has really used this sub-forum before? Well, then I'd like to give it a try :) Even though I'm not sure how much sense it will make since I want to talk about a German page...

There is a client I'm working with for many years now but still their business hasn't been that successful. I guess it's mostly because they had no clear "message" and strategy other than being just another catfood. Anyways, I gave it a little make-over and therefore switched to thirty bees. www.canelis.de

One of the most important Updates is this landing-page: canelis.de/was-ist-gutes-hochwertiges-katzenfutter Which should tell the customer what makes a good catfood and why Canelis is so good. I'm struggling a little with it's google rank - can't get better than ~43 (keyword "hochwertiges Katzenfutter" = high quality catfood). But I'm not sure why. The competition isn't that good... Any ideas how I can improve the rank in an organic fashion?

And any general thoughts?

[wakabayashi]

The page looks nice! I like the landing pages and the content in general. I would clearly recommend to expand this field. Maybe the site can get some ideas from this one: https://www.chewy.com/petcentral I believe they are amazing, when it comse to content marketing.

You should improve the speed of the store. It's too slow here in switzerland...

[Manisch]

@wakabayashi Thanks (: Yea, more content (especially a blog) would be great. The old page had one, but content-creation isn't the owner's strongest suit...

I haven't activated a CDN yet, perhaps it would help in Switzerland. On the other hand I'm not sure I can get that much more out of it with the current webhosting.

[wakabayashi]

Are you using full page cache? Yeah maybe it's the hoster... We are on a (cheap) dedicated server and I don't regret it at all. I believe it's a good investment if there is already a bit of revenue...

[Manisch]

I activated the option "Full page cache" but I haven't linked any modules to a hook because I had some CSS issues with it before :/

I think this shop finally needs to grow before they invest in a better hosting/server. Maybe tomorrow I have time to add a CDN and perhaps this will help a little.

[colorful-ant]

@manisch I like it - looks good

[Baarssen]

@Manisch site looks good, i agree some more content will help. But if the products are getting lost in content its also not helpfull. I watched the other site chewy.com but i should leave it because it gives so much info i cant find the products i am looking for. Maybe something to look at are the prices. Maybe too low? I am selling products since 2005 on internet and i discovered that sometimes, especially when its a private label product it is not helpfull to be cheap. I raised for my private label products the prices with about 30% and my revenue almost tripled after that.

Just curious: which theme did you use?

[lesley]

Great looking site!

[Manisch]

@baarssen hmm, I can't say much about the pricing. The owner always says that "catfood is a difficult market" because people tend to mindlessly buy the cheaper stuff. She even lowered the price. If I remember correctly, it once was 2,39€ and now is 2,02€. In the end...she kinda has...one order per day :x So there really needs to be done something.

The theme is this one (modified): https://www.templatemonster.com/prestashop-themes/b2bstore-prestashop-theme-64019.html

[gonssal]

In Chrome, when I hover the cart icon in the header, the cart contents show up, but when I try to move the mouse inside the contents the box disappears before I can get there.

[Manisch]

@gonssal Yes, I noticed this and I thought it was a bug at first, bur it's only when your cart is empty, which makes somewhat sense.

[Lathaneo]

Spendid!

[pauld]

Nice site thought you should start optimize for speed 1.4 seconds to generate content is too much..

 

I am under 500ms:

Not using full page cache, but my own cache solution, currently deactivated for tested domain..

I also switched from jquery to zepto for front end, it is much more mobile friendly (less javascript parsing on mobile devices), and using my own HTTP2 push module for css and js resources.. CloudFlare is great for lightening your server among other things... when configured correctly..

[Mark]

cloudflare.com definitely worth thinking about, I use them for many sites, all on free cloudflare accounts, makes the world of difference

[Radek]

On 10/11/2019 at 2:45 AM, Mark said:

cloudflare.com definitely worth thinking about, I use them for many sites, all on free cloudflare accounts, makes the world of difference

Even for business sites like shops?

[Traumflug]

Cloudflare comes with the same can of worms as full page caching. Shops require dynamic content, e.g. distinct content of the same page depending on the user currently logged in. Caches remove this dynamic, so one has to take care to disable the cache where it harms.

[datakick]

55 minutes ago, Traumflug said:

Cloudflare comes with the same can of worms as full page caching. Shops require dynamic content, e.g. distinct content of the same page depending on the user currently logged in. Caches remove this dynamic, so one has to take care to disable the cache where it harms.

I don't agree. Cloudflare does not cache dynamic content (php, tpl output), it only caches static content (images, js, css, fonts).

That means you only need to clear cloudflare cache when you edit js/css files. And if you enable CCC, you don't need to worry about this as well. 

[wakabayashi]

8 minutes ago, datakick said:

That means you only need to clear cloudflare cache when you edit js/css files. And if you enable CCC, you don't need to worry about this as well. 

I can confirm that. I had never a single issue on anyting with php. Of course when you develop on js and use ajax you need to be a bit careful to delete the cache. But in general I am very happy with cloudflare.

[veganline]

I run a low budget site using Cloudflare, just for the free shared secure server certificate.
(If I ever got a rush of visitors from headline infamy, or a mention on TV, or PR and advertising, that would be another reason but not yet 🌝) 

 

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200716_VE_ea4468fd31104cc89bc4d78c0e1de17e/1/details/
..shows a shelf on the waterfall which is something to do with the secure server. The Canalis one is done in a different way to mine, via Lets Encrypt, but the delay is the same. I don't know if there is any free and easy solution.

The image slider module looks good. I don't think I have seen a site before where I want to see another image slide onto the top of the home page, but if it's pictures of cats, it looks OK to me. It may delay interest on a slow server.

Foto02.jpg was the one I downloaded, opened in paint.net, and tried to save at different sizes while looking at the ginger cat's eyes and whiskers. Below 100KB there is a rapid reduction in detail, but above 100KB there is not much gain, and 100KB is about 13% of the 1.1MB image that my laptop got.

When I first open the site I see a kind of dotted spiral for a second or so. I suppose this is a sign of it being slow to load from the UK, but it's unusual;  I have not seen it before. I see the same on each page change.

Ordering, I saw a default 5-page checkout.
Someone here has reduced it to three pages with exactly the same functions, which might be quicker for your customers on the bus.

There's also the Chex module, which looks smart and neat and uses only one page so it might pay for itself

https://store.getdatakick.com/en/modules/chex-one-page-checkout

There is something in the tips and tricks section about doing a one page checkout for free, but it blocks-out the account functions of Thirtybees (forgetting to do it on emails) so it might not suit cat customers who want an account for quicker ordering next time.

My test order was too small for the minimum €15 order, which is a lot of cat food. If German post is like most post, there is a cheap option for anything under 2kg with primitive tracking or none. Maybe this would be a good default option, for people who do not want to order enough cat food to justify a courier.

There are niche-market cat foods with seaweed extracts that provide the nutrition a cat needs while containing no meat. A niche market product could be good for attracting interest. I don't know where to get the stuff though.
Good luck with the site
John

---------------------17/07/20
If it's on Netcup hosting at €1.94 x 12 a year including 16% VAT,  (http://archive.is/9mLYV ) that's quite a discovery! A quick google of cheap servers like Hostinger shows prices more than double, but on the other hand such a cheap server is going to need huge attention to image download size and more. For the speed, maybe the free Heliohost would be just as good and charge nothing at all. 

Edited July 17, 2020 by veganline

[Traumflug]

This site triggers requests to various Google and Facebook services (fonts, maps, ...) without user consent. Not compliant with GDPR.

'Foto_02' isn't just above 100 kiB, it's 395 kiB, three times as big a you consider necessary. Still it downloads in 768 ms here, not in more than 3 seconds like in this waterfall diagram. It's Friday 14:00 h now, cheap hosting likely suffers more in peak times.

 

[veganline]

I've just found more links on the waterfall-thing. One is called "View all images", at the bottom of the "Waterfall View" section, just above "Connection View".  The odd thing is this:

https://canelis.de/themes/theme1454/img/ajax-loader-page.gif

This is what I see for a second or two at each page change, viewing from the UK. and it is listed as "ajax loader".
I'm not sure what bit of code is called at each page load, but someone somewhere knows how to work it out.


 

Edited July 18, 2020 by veganline