How to Design a High-Converting Website: A Guide
Are you thinking about redesigning your website? Here's a quick guide on how to design a high-converting website for your business.
More than 63.5% of the world's population currently uses the internet.
Your website can have a huge impact on how successful your business is, so you want to make sure you're using it effectively. It needs to bring in users, and convert them from leads to paying customers. You can better achieve this by putting a focus on building a high-converting website.
In this design guide, we'll cover some of the key elements that will help you increase your conversions. Keep reading for more.
Start With a Strong Foundation
It's essential to develop a strong foundation to build your website around. There are several things that you can do to help with this.
Make It Appealing
The appearance of your website will determine people's initial impressions, and first impressions are key. If people land on your site and it looks poorly made, they're likely to leave immediately. Getting your site designed professionally will ensure it has an appealing, high-quality appearance.
It's often a good idea to base the design on your current branding. Making sure logos, fonts, and colours are consistent across your business will help build an association with customers.
Ensure It Functions Well
While the appearance is important, it won't make much difference if your site doesn't perform properly. This means including all the features that your customers will need and keeping things up to date so that there are no issues. If your site is on WordPress, for example, you'll want all plugins and themes to be updated regularly.
Security is another key element. This will keep your business and your customers safe at all times.
It's also good practice to minimize load speeds. You can do this with things like image optimization, caching, good hosting, and more. For every additional second a website takes to load, the conversion rate can drop by 4.2%, so every second really does count.
Make It Easy to Use
If people have a hard time using your site, they simply won't bother. One of the benefits of going with a professional web designer is that they know how to build a good site map. This will ensure people can navigate your site in a way that makes sense to them.
The most important pages should be easy to find, and they should encourage conversion. This includes things like the contact page, services page, or any other pages that are crucial to your business.
Your customers don't want to have to work hard to get to where they want to be on your site. The easier it is for them, the more conversions you'll get.
Focus On Search Engine Performance
More visitors means more conversions, so increasing traffic to your site will always help. One of the best (and most cost-effective) ways to increase organic traffic is through SEO (search engine optimization). This will place your site higher when people use search engines.
The higher up a page appears on Google and other search engines, the more traffic it will get. Proper website optimization will have a huge impact on this. Load speed will improve SEO, and several other things will help your site rank higher, such as:
- Mobile responsiveness
- Quality backlinks
- Domain authority
- Image optimization (tags, alt text, etc.)
- High-quality content
- Proper keyword use
Google regularly updates its algorithm, so important SEO factors change with time. As such, you will want to ensure your site is routinely optimized so that it can show up as high as possible at all times.
Build an Email List
Email lists are sometimes ignored, but when used correctly, they can be incredibly helpful. This is because it gives you a way to communicate directly with people who have interacted with your brand before.
You want to focus on increasing the number of subscribers you have. A good example of how to do this is with some kind of offer, such as a small video course or a how-to guide.
Once people are on your list, you want to keep them engaged. Provide quality content through something like a weekly newsletter that they find useful, and it should encourage them to want to interact further. You want to build up relationships that will bring them back to your site.
Many companies tailor their email marketing for customers based on previous behaviour. If someone has purchased a specific product, for example, you could send them an email that offers other related products that they're likely to be interested in.
Highlight Critical Info
On every page, you should have a CTA (call to action) which will lead customers to the next step you want them to take. It's important that this CTA is clear and that users are directed toward it.
Visual cues will guide the user's eyes, and each page should have several that highlight the CTA. Things like the layout and colours are important here, and you can even use images to help. This is something that someone new to website design might not get right, but a professional will do it instinctively.
Deliberately Interrupt the Page to Prevent Confusion
The layout is key, and depending on how a page is set up it can either be beneficial or detrimental. Different sections should be split up in some way that makes things clear to users without them having to think about it. This is typically done with things like dividers, or you could have different bodies of text placed in separate boxes.
The more detail there is on a page, the worse this generally is. When looking at a page, are there different sections that blur into each other, or are too many ideas being presented? If so, it may be a good idea to make some changes so that things are a bit clearer.
Building a High-Converting Website
Building any website can be difficult, but ensuring that it's a high-converting website is even more of a challenge. There's a range of areas you want to focus on, and by observing analytics you can continue to make improvements to further increase conversions.
Jumpworks offers a range of services that can help with web design such as CRM marketing, paid advertisement, and content creation. To find out more about our services, click here to schedule a call today.
