Here are a few things you can pay good attention to if you want to improve on your website design for better performance.
Make a Plan
If you resolve to improve your website design, you must have identified issues with it you plan to resolve. First is to sit back and create a plan detailing how you’re going to deal with these issues. Many of these issues have to do with how customers relate with and interact with your website. Map your customer journey on your website and put plans in place to improve the pages they are viewing, time they spend on the site, content they prefer to read and what offers they’re going to convert on. This is the knowledge you need to help you decide who really your customers are and how you can sell them.
Organize Your Website Navigation
How easy it is for customers to navigate your website hugely helps its conversion efficiency. Essentially, great landing page, site maps and internal links help customers to quickly access what they are looking for on your website. They help users to easily dive deeper into very important areas of the site like what your business is about, your services/products, blog content, pricing, promos, discounts, etc. You can greatly enhance the navigation of your website by avoiding poor design practices, such as overloading your navigation with vague or confusing hypertext. These together with lack of proper organization can greatly hamper your website visitors from easily finding where they want to go and what they want. To enhance customers user experience on your website, you must pay good attention to how easy it to navigate the site.
Make Your CTA Conspicuous
Your call-to-action CTA buttons must be conspicuous on your website to ensure no visitor fails to notice them. CTAs help to guide your visitors to places on your website that will help them convert. What exactly are these conspicuous places? Marketing experts recommend the first column of your navigation, which is one of the most popular places for CTAs to be put. You can position these CTAs to link to a free guide where visitors can learn more under sections needing action and at the bottom of your website pages. That can be great for conversions.
Showcase Product Reviews
Customers experience with products helps others to make their buy decisions. That experience comes by way of product reviews which you can showcase on your website and around the products you are selling. Most buyers gain more confidence by merely looking at these reviews. If they see a product which others say it does what it promises to do, it prompts buyers to buy it. How marketers showcase reviews depends on the products they are marketing and the versatility of their business websites. It could be in form of texts or videos even though video testimonials are generally more effective because of their captivating visual content. Naturally, media tends to hold users’ attention longer and establishes a stronger human connection because people hear voices and see real people’s faces real time.
Don’t Ignore Sitemaps
Sitemaps on a website help its navigation and generally enhance user experience. It is these maps that display the main places that users can visit and to dive deeper into areas where your products and prices are displayed. The aim is to help direct new and returning customers to key areas of your website where they can convert. What really matters therefore is to improve your website with sitemaps in such a way that with just one click, users can easily access these key and important places in your website where they can do business with you.
Optimize the Website for Mobile Devices
As at today, you risk losing out from a huge percentage of web traffic if your website is not optimized for mobile. A good way around that is to make sure your site performs well on mobile devices and larger displays because from Google reports, about 80% of web users now access the web from mobile devices like smartphones. As a marketer, that is one huge chunk of traffic you cannot afford lose out of. Many more people are now doing business online any and everywhere and on the go. Their main gadgets of choice are smartphones.
Minimize Browsing Distractions
Browsing distractions as the name implies are time-wasting for web users. Therefore, on your website, you must do away with any elements that can distract users. Some of such elements are complicated animations, overly long content and chunky/gaudy website images/gifs. The attention span of most web users is notoriously short. So, what you want your visitors to see should be easily visible to them short of unhelpful distractions. All you want is to avoid anything that creates distraction or visual confusion for users trying to convert. If you are not getting conversions, your business struggles.
Make Product Prices Easy to Find
This is inevitable because it is products you want to sell anyway. If buyers cannot access your products and their prices easily, they quit your site and look elsewhere. If buyers spend quality time finding your products and they are required to spend more time looking for the prices, you risk losing such buyers to your competition. Online shoppers are notoriously hasty as most marketers very well know. To avoid frustrating buyers and risk losing them to your completion, be sure your products and their prices are easy for them to find on your website.
Use the Right Stock Images
When choosing stock images to use, strive to avoid the cheesy and poorly lit stock photos that are common on the internet. Buyers are very smart people and many are everywhere online. Many recognize cheap and common stock photos when they see them. Some of such photos that are well choreographed with fake and exaggerated smiles won’t help your business. They affect the credibility of your business if many other websites feature the same images. Users subconsciously project their negative experiences onto these stock photos, reducing confidence and adding friction to the conversion process. If convenient, try to use original photos on your website. You don’t need too much expertise to do this. These days, even smartphones can give you good photos you can use on your website.
