How to Improve your Website Conversion Rate through Better UX Design

Contributed post.

Conversion rates are the ultimate measure of business website success. Healthy conversion rates mean higher revenue and sales. Poor conversion rates mean your website isn’t converting visitors into prospects or customers; the investment you are making in driving traffic is generating a low return, or worse—it’s just wasted.

Solid conversion rates are vital for a successful online business or B2B website. The one factor that arguably impacts conversion rates more than anything else is user experience (UX).

What is UX Design?

88% of online shoppers say they won’t return to a site after having a bad experience. It’s estimated that as many as 70% of online businesses fail simply because they didn’t conduct the necessary testing and work to boost their UX design.

The user experience starts as soon as a visitor lands on your website. It’s what happens during this process and how it impacts or satisfies your site visitors. Their experience is affected by many factors such as loading speed, quality of content, and graphic design.

Maze’s UX design guide helpfully describes the role of UX designers. According to the guide, the job of a UX designer is to perfect every part of this and ensure that the site meets the user’s needs, pain points, and expectations.

If visitors are happy with your content, ease of navigation, visual design, and overall experience, you can expect higher conversion rates.

Actionable Tips to Improve Conversion Rates

Great design and UX equals higher conversion rates, but how can you get there? Usability testing tools like Maze can make the process much easier, showing exactly what you need to do to improve the quality of your design.

Here are seven more helpful tips.

1. Design a smart CTA.

Your call to action (CTA) is the button visitors will click to turn into sales leads or customers. This is your desired outcome – to convince them to take action. Every element of your site content and design should prompt them to make the decision. Once a visitor is interested in your offer, their next step should be easy and obvious.

To get your visitors to take action, make the CTA as clear and visible as possible. There are many different types of CTAs you may want to include on your site: a newsletter signup, blog subscription, app download, ebook or white paper download, demo or consultation schedule, webinar or live event registration, or direct purchase.

What makes a great CTA? First, your CTA should be clear. People should understand exactly what to expect or what will happen as soon as they see the button.

Second, it needs to be available. Ideally, you’ll have a contextually relevant CTA on every page of the website. You never know when people will decide to take action.

Last, it should be visible. If your site has a busy design with lots of text and images, its important to keep your CTA above the fold. You should also pick colors that stand out based on the rest of the design and background.

2. Use high-quality, unique visuals.

Over-used free images ruin the good design for your brand. Commonly used stock photos that visitors have seen on numerous other sites cheapen your brand and won’t attract attention.

According to Venngage, 49% of marketers use visual content on their sites and social media channels more than written text. To create a positive impression and make your site memorable, as well as get more conversions, it’s crucial to make every part of your design unique and appealing: images, videos, icons, diagrams, charts, graphs, drawings, and any other visual elements you include.

3. Eliminate those annoying 404 errors.

How annoying is it when you click a link and a 404 error appears? Many visitors will leave your site if they find even a single page-not-found error. This instantly means lower conversion rates. Redirect any pages you remove to relevant active pages to help prevent these errors.

Even with proactive efforts, 404 errors will still happen. To minimize and resolve these, you first need to know which searches result in such errors so you can remove or redirect those links. You can also personalize your error page to make it more friendly. Visitors will be less annoyed if your 404 page is creative or amusing.

It’s almost impossible to find and eliminate all such errors. That’s why a unique 404 page design can help.

4. Speed up loading time.

Google reports that 53% of mobile users (which account for the majority of overall web traffic) will leave your page if it doesn’t load within three seconds. Yes, just three seconds.

Even if your visitors are willing to wait a bit longer, long load times create a poor experience. And, they’ll certainly hate it if they have to wait to open every page they are interested in. The slower your pages open, the lower your chance of conversion.

Slow loading pages can mean visitors will view fewer pages, and might never get to take the desired action. That’s why it’s vital to optimize your site for mobile and desktop users.

There are plenty of tools that can hep with this, starting with PageSpeed Insights by Google. This tool will show you which parts of your site are weak in terms of speed—and even tell you how to improve them.

5. Spice up your content with videos.

Too much written content can be off-putting, no matter how well written it is. Many visitors may not even start reading your content unless there’s some interesting visually to grab their attention. Even then, many visitors will skim your text rather than reading it word for word.

That’s why videos are so popular. They are engaging, present content much faster, and people love them. According to OptinMonster, over 80% of video marketers believe that videos help with lead generation, increase traffic, and improve sales.

You need a killer marketing video for this to work, so focus on creating something unique and of high quality. Check out this video marketing guide from Visme for helpful, actionable ideas.

6. Make your site easy on the eyes.

Readability is key to a good user experience. High contrast, white space, and clear type all make reading easier.

On top of this, there’s (again) the matter of skimming. Most people don’t read all the content on a page. They skim the site content to find what they are looking for. If they don’t find it right away, they’ll often move to your competition and you’ll lose conversions.

To fix this, first, make sure that your content is readable. Use a clear and visually appealing font size and color, pick a neutral background, and avoid or very selectively use hard-to-read “artsy” fonts.

You can also use fonts, colors, and other features to emphasize key information. Bold your critical points, italicize them, make the font bigger – everything to show people what information is the most important part of your content.

7. Consider free offers.

People love getting free things. Whether it is a small gift as a thank you for their order, a test product for them to try out before they make a purchase, or even something as simple as free shipping – this can help build brand preference and loyalty.

NuFace, a producer of anti-aging devices, decided to give people an incentive to increase their conversion rate. They displayed a free shipping message for orders over $75. Not only did this convince people to buy more products to get the free shipping, but the number of orders jumped by 90%.

Take Care of Your UX to Boost Conversions

User experience plays a huge role in optimizing your conversion rates. It can potentially make or break your online business. If you do your best to ensure that your UX design is awesome, your website visitors will be more likely to convert in high numbers. These pointers will help get you started.