How Can You Boost Your Conversion Rate With Web Design?

When it comes to marketing channels and strategies sometimes it’s hard to decide which one you should prioritize: social media? SEO? Lead generation? It’s really a matter of balancing your options.

Web design is one of such alternatives and it has been increasingly receiving more attention and relevancy in the past years.

Yes, something that didn’t seem as important just a few years ago is now one of the crucial aspects for any business that wants to increase and escalate sales. 

It’s often said that you have to imagine your website as your store in the Internet city, and Google is the main highway. Not only do you need to attract some traffic from that highway, but it’s also your website’s duty to captivate the visitor’s attention and guide them through the process of making a purchase.

Web design is a crucial task in this regard, and here you will learn how to use it to boost your conversion rate and close more sales.

1. Compress Your Images 

The importance of visual assets (i.e. video, images, graphs, infographics, etc.) cannot be stressed enough. Pretty much anyone on the internet understands this and acts as a result of it. We have an innate preference for richer visual stimuli. However, there is a collateral consequence of placing too much visual information on your website: it’s gonna take longer to load, which will negatively impact its overall performance.

To achieve the desired 3-second-max load time, you need to compress your images. Basically, what you need to do is take control of your image sizes to make your website load faster.

Image compression can be lossy or lossless: 

• Lossy works by discarding information from the original file
• Lossless retains all the original data (though, the file size tends to be bigger).

There’s a variety of image compression Software you can check.

2. Have a Consistent Brand Image Across Your Site

Developing a strong brand is all about storytelling. Thus, you should constantly ask yourself if your website is telling the right story. Are you creating a story, and sharing values through your brand? If not, it’s a good time to reorient the message you are transmitting.

When developing your story, keep your target audience in mind. Will the message you are trying to share resonate with them? If so, how can it be displayed on your website to make it impactful? Here are some best practices:

• Make your headline engaging and communicative about your goals as a brand.
• Feature a slideshow of some of your products or images listing your best products or services
• Your company logo should be at the top left corner of your homepage
• Create a personality around your brand, and show the real people behind it.

3. Take Advantage of Expectations

Every visitor that comes to your website has some kind of expectation. At the same time, there are expectable features from each different kind of website: For instance, an online retailer should display an “add to cart” button, a utility provider should have a live support chat, etc.

 Features like those should be strategically placed on the website. Analyze the type of product or service you offer, and optimize accordingly. 

You can even check out what your competitors are doing to get inspiration from them. Another way to know what works well for you is to get customer feedback. Ask them for ideas, check what their regular complaints are, ask your sales team about frequent customer concerns, etc. Also, since your best option to get information directly from your customers are web forms, consider optimizing your contact form to collect valuable feedback. 

4. Play with Color and Contrast

Different color combinations can evoke different emotions. Thus, you can make your website represent that emotional state. You can also use salient colors where you want visitors to take action. Take your time when choosing what colors to use on each page.

Contrast has a similar effect on attention. For instance, you can add some contrast to a specific section in which visitors can find a discount or special offer. This will drive more attention to it. 

If you want a customer to remain longer on your website, use light and fresh colors and decrease contrast to those options that take them out of the page. Test and experiment with different variants, and assess the impact to choose the best design, based on data. This will help you convert more as well.

5. Show Human Faces on Your Website

Research shows that human faces elicit emotional responses. Whether you see someone face to face, or in a photo, it works. 

Have headshots of the team of people behind your business on your homepage, and have them put on their best smile. You need to show that your product or service is trustworthy, and so is the team of people who put it together. Your team members need to look professional, confident, and kind in those pictures, this will make visitors feel more comfortable purchasing on your website.

Another way to cleverly use human faces is to have some of them facing and pointing at where you want the visitor to look. That way, they will unknowingly take the cue, and read whatever message you directed them to. You can also get very creative merging this strategy with others, for example having the people in your website’s images looking or pointing at the CTA button. 

6. Leave Enough White Space 

The content and elements on your web pages need just enough white space around them, this causes the main aspects of your website to stand out in the viewer’s eye. A page too overloaded with text, images, buttons, and zero white space will most likely drive visitors away, affecting your conversions. 

The elements you need to strategize to achieve this are:

• Spacing
• Margins
• Padding

Adding those elements will effectively increase space between content, images, and sections. If you have other elements in mind such as ads, have them well spaced too. Remember your most important task here is to balance your possibilities, it can’t be all white spaces. 

7. Categorize your Products or Services

It may seem counterintuitive, but offering way too many options to your prospects might be less beneficial than having just a handful of them. When we are presented with a vast amount of items to choose from, we experience what’s called the paradox of choice: the more options we have available, the less satisfied we’ll feel with the choice made, plus it increases decision making time, which counts massively in the virtual setting.

To avoid this, you can either reduce the number of alternatives displayed or sort your products inside categories, that way people will feel less overwhelmed when making a decision.

8. Include Animations

Effective and clever animations can better your user experience and, in turn, generate higher conversions. However, overdoing this can lead you to the opposite effect. You’ll need to consider your audience’s interests and potential reactions to those animations. 

Pop-ups are another tool that you can use wisely and proportionately to engage your users, lead them to a CTA, prevent them from leaving your website, make an announcement, etc. Pop-ups may get really annoying, so don’t overdo it. Including one or two pop-ups max is right about enough.

9. Place Related Elements Together

Our brains like to categorize knowledge, therefore we feel more comfortable interpreting everything in terms of classes, and categories. The same thing happens when we visit a website: we naturally group certain elements. When we learn something new, we do it by matching new variables and concepts to a previous memory or understanding.

Placing related elements together will have a greater impact on user experience, and visitors will find what they’re looking for more easily, as well as navigate to specific and related options. 

For example, if you have customer reviews, you can place a CTA button right next to them. Add the same color scheme and shape to them and you will see increased conversion rates. Use words like “join our community”, “be a part of our family”, “Try it yourself”, “Find [product/service] near me” and it will definitely create a sense of relatedness in the visitor that will eventually translate into more sales.

10. Provide Valuable Content

Google remains the king of the internet and it doesn’t seem to be losing its position anywhere soon. From Google’s perspective content is everything, and they do a great job in selecting valuable options that match specific queries to the best possible content. 

Even though this is not specifically web designing, you must take into consideration the content you will provide in your website when designing its structure. 

If you want your business to be competitive in the online scenario you need to offer valuable content to your audience, and optimize it for the Search Engine to understand it in full, including heading tags, contexts, images and videos, topic, keywords, etc.

Some ways to achieve this include:

• Hire copywriters: Doing everything on your own can lead to an imbalance. Thus, get yourself a good copywriter for evergreen useful content. Having users engaged on the page contents increases conversion chances.
• Use SEO: Search Engine Optimization is basically making your website competitive and understandable by Google’s crawlers. It’s a very important tool nowadays to get more traffic from Google searches and it will indirectly impact your conversion rate if you do it properly. You can also hire a specialized agency to do it for you.
• Invest in good visuals: Images, videos, and illustrations placed on your content should be high quality and should add value. Use charts, statistics, photographs, animations, etc. As indicated earlier, remember to compress them and be measured, to not compromise website speed and performance.

Conclusion

Experiment with the different strategies described above and you will see how your conversion rates rise. Yet, these are not absolute strategies which means that you’ll have to evaluate and figure out what works best for your business.

Be always mindful of what the key aspects of a great Web Design are. At the same time, try out new things, record and evaluate their impact, and be constantly on the lookout for new techniques. 

More importantly, listen to what your users have to say. It is often through feedback that you get the most useful ideas. Finally, never be afraid to change things if required. It is a fast-paced world, and change is the only thing that’s constant.