c, purchase a product, or contact you for more information about your services. Whatever the objective is, getting your visitors to complete the goal is referred to as conversion. For any website owner, increasing your conversion rate – or, the number of people who convert divided by the total number of visitors to your website – should be a primary focus.
There are many ways you can go about improving your conversion rates, but one of the most effective things you can do is consider your website’s design. By modifying the design with conversion rates in mind, you can make your website cleaner, easier to use, and ultimately better at converting. Here’s how:
Give Your Users Fewer Choices
One of the first things you should look at is the number of options your user has when entering your website. The more choices someone has, the more time they will take to make their decision. You want to avoid this. Too many options can overwhelm your visitors, rather than directing them where you want them to go.
Think about if you walked into a supermarket looking for cereal. If you were presented with five options, such as the ALDI version of breakfast cereal options, it would probably take you a minute or two to decide which kind you want. If you were presented with two hundred possibilities, however, it would take you a lot longer. During this time you may get so fed up with trying to decide which cereal to get, that you decide to go with a loaf of bread and make toast instead.
So how can you limit choices? For starters, you can limit the number of items in your navigation bar. Then look at things like the number of social share buttons you’re using, how many different ways people can contact you, or the number of blog posts appearing on a single page.
Speed Up The Site
Most people don’t want to wait too long to get information online. If they open up a website, and it takes more than a few seconds to load, they are more likely to exit out of it and try another site. As a website owner, it is imperative that you don’t waste your visitors’ time. To avoid this, you’ll want to ensure a speedy website.
You can speed up your website in a number of ways. First, you can shrink down the file size of any images you are using. Another thing you can do is move your website to a faster server. Many factors go into determining how fast a website loads – if you’d like more advice, try using Google’s PageSpeed tool to measure your site’s load speed and get suggestions.
Grab Their Attention Right Away
There’s a general rule of thumb that says you only have 8 seconds to grab someone’s attention. This means you need to act quickly if you’re going to keep your website’s visitor around. To do this, make sure you are using attractive colours and that you have large catchy headlines. You can also consider adding in multimedia, such as having a video or audio clip playing when someone enters the site.
Perform Split Testing
Finally, the best thing you can do is run some tests – specifically split testing. Split testing is when you run two versions of your website – or a page on the site – with small differences between the two versions. When a user visits, they are randomly shown one of the two versions. Over time you can track the two versions of the same page, and see which one performs better.
Split testing is a great way to see what helps your website convert better, and what doesn’t. For example, let’s say you’re trying to get more people to sign up for your newsletter. On one version on the page you have a popup window, and on the other, you have a sign-up form in the sidebar. After a month you could see which got more submissions, and use that method on the site going forward. You can find more information on split testing here.
The key to optimising your website’s design for high conversions is to try new things, see what works, and then continue to look for improvements. If you can do this, along with using some basic principles like keeping it simple and catching their attention, you should be able to improve your conversion rates and in turn grow your business.
To learn more about optimising your web design for conversions, please feel free to contact us at any time.
