Website Design Best Practices To Boost Conversions

Is your online store ready for the upcoming holiday shopping season? Website design plays a vital role in affecting your website user experience and conversions. Here are a few best practices of website design that can boost conversions. Let’s take a couple of minutes to review which area your eCommerce site can improve and thrive in the shopping season.  

Clear Navigation Paths

Good website navigation should be simple, clear and accurate. Massive navigation menus with lots of tiers and links have negative impact on your website conversion. According to Hick’s Law, the more choices you have, the longer time you need to take for reaction. And subsequently you will become indecisive and lose interest in those choices altogether. Your visitors will be overwhelmed by a massive menu and unsure where they should click first. To improve your conversion, you should provide a clear navigation path that can lead your visitors to get the information they need quickly. Moreover, reduce the number of tiers and clicks needed to convert on your website. Make sure your visitors can go through the process seamlessly and in the shortest number of steps possible.

Highly Visible Call to Action

Your call to action button needs to be obvious in order to entice your visitors to click on it. One of the easiest ways to draw more attention to your call to action buttons is to use eye-catching color that is contrast with the rest of your website. If you have more than one call to action, use less catchy colors for the secondary call to action. However, keep in mind that the effectiveness of call to action will be reduced if you have many of them on one page. Ideally, there should be one call to action per page. Apart from the use of color, the position of call to action buttons is another critical factor. High converting button should be placed where your visitors make decisions, probably after they have read related content. For example, a “sign up now” button should be placed in a spot where a user will find it after reading about your product, not before. Moreover, you can add a sense of urgency in your website by using text such as “Shop Now”, instead of “Shop Here”.

Keep Your Website Simple

A clean website design that is well-structured and uncluttered can minimize distractions for your visitors. With a more straightforward website design, your visitors can understand your website easily so that they can navigate through the pages and get what they need at utmost ease. It brings your visitors a good user experience and increases their likelihood to convert. Moreover, a minimalist design also allows you to have more space for call to actions. All non-essential elements can be removed and stand out the call to actions.

Focus On Speed

Your website speed has a huge impact on your conversion rate. The faster your website loading time is, the lower the bounce rate and the more likely your visitors convert. To improve your website loading time, you should choose a reliable web hosting service. While it may be tempting to choose the cheapest web hosting plans for your website, you get what you pay for. On the other hand, simplifying your website design also helps reduce loading time. If you have lots of images, long blocks of text, massive menus, lots of colors and other unnecessary elements, the loading time will take longer. You should minimize those unnecessary elements and compress all uploaded images to a size that is no larger than what the screen size demands. There are free tools online to help you analyze your page speed and troubleshoot related issues. Try Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom and see how your website performs.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices

To boost conversion, your website design needs to be consistent across all devices. Nowadays, the majority of website traffic comes from mobile devices. Having a mobile-friendly website is now more important than ever. You have to make sure your website is both functional and comfortable for mobile users. Responsive websites become a trend because it can adjust its layout automatically according to the screen size of the devices, providing good user experience to your visitors. If you want to learn more about how to make your website mobile-friendly, check out our previous blog post.

Install SSL Certification

Last but not least, make sure SSL certificate is installed on your website. SSL encrypts the data your customers enter on your website. It protects your customers’ personal and payment information from being stolen by hackers and data thieves. After you have installed SSL certificate, a green padlock symbol will show up next to your URL in visitor’s browser bars. Your domain name will start with https instead of http. These signs can increase visitors’ trust in your website and encourage them to convert.

Conclusion

Above are some best practices of website design that can boost conversion. Test them out on your websites and evaluate the results constantly. Remember to keep on fine-tuning based on your actual user behavior. Eventually, you will know what works best for your visitors.