7 Essential Web Design Strategies to Increase Conversions

What are Conversions or Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Conversions are when visitors take a specific intended action on a site for example buying a product, filling out a form, or contacting you for a service. On the other hand, conversion rate optimisation refers to a set of practices or strategies followed to increase the number of visitors that take the desired action on a website.

The road to conversion rate optimisation isn’t intricate, but it’s a strategy that requires a website owner to think about it right from the designing phase. When crafting a website, most owners only think about how to optimise a website for traffic, but traffic may not necessarily mean conversions. For that matter, a web designer must curate a website in a way that the visitors take the desired course of action to impact the conversion rate.

The Pivot: While designing a website, there are a few elements to keep in mind and they include;

The Homepage: Depending on the type of website, the homepage is also known as the landing page and it is a crucial aspect of any website. The homepage must be designed in a way that it gives the first impression on your visitors. Always remember that the first impression is what it takes to turn visitors into leads or customers.

Responsive design: More and more customers are searching for products and services online before they reach out to a physical store. However, customers who use mobile devices to search the web expect the same experience as when using a desktop. Google also considers a responsive design as one of its ranking factors. So, ensure to render your site responsive to impact your conversions.

White Spaces: White space is the unused space on any page of your website. Although it is blank, white spaces play a vital role in rendering your text scannable, readable and engaging. Proper use of white space can help you keep all website elements uncluttered and attractive.

Blog: Blogs are excellent marketing strategies since they help provide important information to your website visitors. Ensure to incorporate CTAs where necessary in your blogs or articles for the readers to take the desired action.

How to Optimise a Site for Increased Conversions?

Here are some of the most effective ways suggested by a professional website design agency through which you can optimise your site for quality conversions;

1. Up Your Website Speed

Speed is a crucial factor to focus on when prepping your site for all-round performance. More importantly, it is also a ranking factor for Google. If you want your website to make it to the first page of Google and ideally get better traffic, or positively impact the conversation rate make sure that your website loads faster.

The average load time for a website is 3 seconds, but the faster a website loads the better. A load time delay of even a second can reduce conversions by 7%. Website visitors require any website to load fast and if a website manager adheres to this, there will also be an increase in conversion rate.

2. Include SEO Elements

A website is a great marketing tool and while designing it, it’s essential to know the different ways you can generate organic traffic. In order to get more conversions, try to ensure that your website is SEO-friendly right from the start. Things like a clean URL structure, unique title and descriptions and optimised images can help web crawlers easily interpret your website content and index the pages. Your SEO practices must include the right keywords and the website content must be aligned excellently.

3. Focus on User Experience

When you invest time in understanding what your visitors do once they land on your page, it can help you provide a better user experience. Implementing heatmaps is one of the best ways through which you can learn how visitors navigate your site. i.e whether they scroll down, visit other pages or click on the CTAs. Once you learn what engages your website users and what doesn’t this can help you provide the best user experience which can impact your conversion rate positively.

4. Use Clear CTAs

Apart from engaging content, an attractive design, and user-friendly navigation, CTAs are the primary elements that complete a page. Calls-to-action like “sign up”, “subscribe”, “buy now”, “download now” urge visitors to take a specific action. If you want your visitors to take a specific action on your page, ensure to couple your content with clear calls to action. The colour of your CTAs and positioning can help them stand out. Strategically place your CTAs with your user in mind to increase the probability of your visitors doing what you want them to do.

5. Implement the Rule of Thirds

Even though highly known to be a photography principle, this rule is also helpful in web design. All you have to do is to divide the page into thirds (vertically and horizontally). It will produce four intersections and nine squares. These fours intersections are strategic positions since they draw the visitor’s eyes automatically.

When you put important images, text, or CTAs in these intersections it creates a more impactful design that triggers the visitors to take the intended action. In simple terms, visitors will focus on the text or content in these places which can directly boost your website conversions.

6. Play with Colours

Anything colourful is beautiful to the eyes! When crafting your website for better conversions, keep in mind that colours have meanings and play a major role in conveying your message to the website visitor. Different colour combinations can evoke different meanings, impressions and reactions.

So when choosing a colour scheme for your website make sure to use colours that evoke the meanings you want. For example in London, blue represents calmness, yellow for hope and happiness, pink for sophistication etc. In addition, use contrast to keep CTAs, headlines, and other text readable. This will help you improve the site’s conversion rate.

7. Prefer Quality Images

High-quality images result in a more professional design and can help drive the point home than a million words. When curating a site, a designer must pay attention to the type of images selected for use. People love images that are full of life and those that relate to them, so select images as per the website’s content.

Besides, you don’t need to be a photographer to find or use quality images on your website. There are many stock photo sites for free great photos. With all that, know that images can either make or break your site. Also, remember to optimise the images so that they don’t affect the site’s loading speed.

Conclusion

Websites are created for different reasons such as generating leads, enhancing brand awareness, increasing sales, or ROI. However, every target is attained through a process known as “conversion.” As we conclude, we believe that we have tackled several dimensions of conversion rate optimisation using web design strategies.

We hope this piece will help you double your website conversions effortlessly even without investing in a website redesign. If you wish to have these elements implemented on your website, please reach out to RVS Media. We are an eCommerce development company with a team proficient in all aspects of web design, development, and maintenance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are you now versed with the essential web design strategies to increase conversions? Now let’s have a quick look at the possible questions you may have in mind.

• Conversion Rate Optimisation Vs Website Optimisation

  Conversion rate optimisation ‘CRO’ and website optimisation are two different things. Website optimisation is a wide term that enhances the overall performance of a website which includes its conversion rate. The best strategies to optimise a website include user experience, mobile-first approach, schema, continent marketing, core web vitals etc.

• What is involved in website optimisation?

  Website optimisation is a complex term and involves implementing several strategies and techniques to improve a website’s performance. With performance, we mean the rate of traffic, number of conversions, leads, and ROI. Search engine optimisation is one of the best strategies to enhance a site’s performance.

• What’s a good conversion rate?

  This is quite a common question; however, there is no absolute answer for it. Conversion rates highly vary depending on a few factors such as type of industry, the intended course of action, and audience demographics. However, a good conversion rate can range from 2% to 5% for some of the websites.

  If your conversion rate is lower than desired, then you have a bad conversion rate and looking into the factors listed above can help you improve your website’s conversion rate.

• How to calculate a conversion rate?

  You simply have to divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors and then multiply by 100. You will get the result in a percentage.