A visitor’s first impression when browsing a website is crucial for client conversion rates. If your website is created with the user in mind, the conversion rate will naturally grow. When visitor’s needs are clearly front and center, they return to the website over and over.
Web design, with all of its complexity, deals with a site’s performance and usability. That is, a reliable web designer will make sure that your website functions well, is convenient to use, and provides visitors with easy access to features that fulfill their needs. Nevertheless, perfect web design involves a lot more than just a cute layout and easy navigation features. When the web design services executed correctly, it almost automatically improves visitors’ experience of browsing a website. It, in turn, leads to higher traffic and sales. In other words, if you want to get new customers and efficiently keep the current ones while developing your company’s reputation, it’s necessary to make sure your site is designed in the best way possible.
But, how do you design a site if your company isn’t dealing with designing websites at all and you have zero ideas about what you should focus on, what techniques you should apply, etc.? The best way around this is to hire a reputable web design agency. A qualified agency will assist you with a lot more than just providing a soulless, template-based site. A reliable design company will put all the effort into going through the web design process that involves all aspects of creating a website that reflects your brand and solidifies its presence on the internet. Your company site will turn out even better if you bring your marketing and development team together and connect them with the agency’s design team, as they will most certainly learn a lot of things from web design experts, and this information can later be used for your business’s promotion and marketing.
There are four main aspects of boosting your website’s conversion rates.
Resolve 404 Errors
First of all, no one wants to see a page that doesn’t load. When people visit your website, they usually expect to open a homepage – or whatever other pages they need – and get at least some answers to their questions. Most often, if users stumble across a 404 error on a site, they leave to look for the same products or services on other websites. And by other websites, we mean your competitors. This leads to a decrease in conversion rates. But there is an answer..
You can easily avoid 404 errors by using one of these three common solutions:
- Determining the page with the 404 error and immediately fixing it;
- Personalizing the generic notification that says, “404 Error: Page cannot be displayed,” so it still ties the page to the website (you may talk to your web design agency and come up with something, like “We’re very sorry you can’t access this page, but the issue is going to be fixed ASAP”);
- Putting entertaining, but relevant, images onto the error page as a means of reducing any distress caused to the user.
In other words, there is no particular or exclusive way to fix the problem. The best way is to trust your web design company, as they specialize in providing Internet users with the best experience possible.
Create CTAs
A call to action, or CTA, is a crucial part of maintaining healthy conversion rates. Usually, CTAs are buttons placed in the right places throughout a website. You’ve seen a great deal of them, with some of the most popular being “Sign up,” “Book now,” and “Start a trial,” among others. A prominent and clear CTA is quite useful, as it allows users to grasp the idea of where they might get the thing they’ve come to your site for in the first place. It helps to improve their experience on your website, and consequently, to boost its conversion rate. Moreover, if you have a fold on your site, your calls to action should stay above it to be more visible and more comfortable to access.
Here are a couple of more things about CTA you might want to consider:
- Colorful CTAs are more engaging and look more original;
- Less than five words make very effective CTAs;
- CTAs must include subtle text and be associated with an action.
Either way, it’s best to trust your web design agency to create CTAs for your site. Make sure that you and the agency’s team understand each other so that your website’s CTAs affect it more positively.
Actual Visual Content
Carefully selected images guarantee better user engagement and improved overall appearance on the site. The very first thing that should be taken into account is that the image type you choose will seriously affect the overall design of the webpage. To get truly astonishing results, you need to forget about stock photos and ensure any design agency you work with follows does as well. Many sites use stock images because they are very cheap and universally applicable to any website. However, they do more harm more than good overall. While stock images might seem engaging in the beginning, they become very dull over time and harm website conversion rates.
At the same time, original photos and images add an engaging and realistic touch, which builds an additional connection between your brand and your site’s visitors. Moreover, the use of innovative visual content is similar to letting your audience know that you’ve researched them and have invested time and money into creating an excellent website for them. Your web design agency will know what to do at the end of the research stage, so you will need to provide input about your brand to them to complete the full picture.
Short Loading Times
Long loading times annoy most internet users. If your site doesn’t load quickly, don’t expect many users to wait or return to it. Your website should load within 3 seconds. If it doesn’t, visitors will simply leave it and look for whatever they need in other places – on your competitors’ sites. Loading time influences the user’s decision about whether to browse through any given website. That is, the quicker your website loads, the higher its conversion rates and ROI. Make sure that the web design agency optimizes your company website for both mobile and desktop platforms to cover all internet users.
The Bottom Line
We have reviewed several critical web design aspects that significantly influence your site conversions. There are a lot more of them in the open, with each of them requiring an individual approach. Although you will collaborate with a web design company and don’t have to comprehend all the detailed mechanisms and approaches, it’s still helpful to know how and why any given factor can boost or wreck your rate of website conversions.