Do you desire to build a website that boasts high conversion rates? If so, you’re not alone, as this is the dream of every business owner with a website, be it an affiliate site, marketing blog, e-commerce website, or lead-gen site. However, you can’t realize this dream without first learning the fundamentals of building a high converting site. Otherwise, your conversion, which is turning potential leads into paying clients, becomes a lot harder.
Because of this, the importance of designing a high converting website can’t be understated. However, accomplishing this, though not as complex as rocket science, requires considerable effort and dedication. And in today’s digital-driven world, it’s only with a high converting website that you’re guaranteed considerable customer conversion. And to help you realize this, read on as this guide takes a look at the basics of a high converting website.
Table of contents
1. Easy To Navigate
The last thing a potential lead wants is landing on your website but having a hard time finding the information they want. If this happens, you can be certain that these customers will quickly switch to your competitor’s site and never return. Luckily, you can easily prevent this from happening by designing an easy to navigate website, and the different ways of accomplishing this include;
- Placing headers in a natural position comfortable to the eye
- Using easy to identify and relevant navigation tabs
- Ensuring your site follows a logical order
- Including a search button to easily locate any information you’re searching
Therefore, you should ensure your website possesses each of these qualities to help it match the competition that has high converting websites. It’s also important to place the navigation links, including About, Contact, and Products. With that said, this doesn’t mean you should overdo the number of categories or products to include because this might end up confusing the users. Ideally, it’s best to limit the number of menu items to seven or fewer.
2. Include A Sitemap
Although the use of sitemaps is sometimes ignored despite its importance in boosting your site’s conversion rate, you shouldn’t make such a mistake. But before you even make use of this element, you need first to ask yourself the question, what are sitemaps? The use of sitemaps, which basically are an overview of a site’s most crucial pages that ease the work of search engines to locate and crawl them, is vital in SEO. In addition, sitemaps come in handy to your site visitors because it effortlessly helps them locate a specific web page they want to visit.
The sitemap you choose needs to be reliable to show your website’s hierarchy. This is also to ensure everything is linked and nothing is missed.
3. Clear Call-To-Action (CTA)
Users usually need further convincing to be converted from potential leads into paying clients. Otherwise, they may end up only reading your excellent content and interacting with your web page yet not offering you any value in the long run. Fortunately, there’s a way you can best prevent such a scenario, and this is by including an action-oriented, noticeable, and clear call to action. This way, you’ll give the potential leads that extra nudge to move in the desired direction.
Examples of some common CTAs include;
- Buy Now
- Sign Up
- Join Today
- Learn More
- Get Started
- Subscribe
- Try For Free
But while CTAs increase the conversion chances of a potential lead, how you format it greatly affects the conversion rates. And for optimal efficiency, make sure your CTA is unique in terms of its graphics or icons and text formatting. In addition, you need to look at its on-page placement location because it should ideally be positioned somewhere easily noticeable to a user.
Because CTAs are meant to give users a sense of urgency and thus act as desired, it’s easy to get tempted into overusing them. However, you mustn’t make such a mistake as this will confuse your users. Instead, your focus should be on using more specific CTAs as they’re clearer and better. They can also convince potential leads to take the desired action.
4. Integrate Live Chats
You want your customers to be quickly attended to right away whenever they experience any issue, and this is precisely why it’s necessary to use live chats. Today, this feature is a must-have for any high converting site, and any query by the potential leads can either be answered by a human or chatbots.
Live chats are also preferred by customers as they find them more convenient, unlike making a call to have any issue they’re experiencing resolved. Because of this, many high converting sites have incorporated the use of live chats. Besides being convenient and low-risk, chatbots offer potential leads which is a convenient way of getting additional details about a product or service.
Thanks to live chats, you’re in a position to answer in a couple of seconds any question that your customer might have. And being always there for your clients whenever they have an issue will give your business a positive image in the long run. This will consequently result in an increase in your site’s conversion rate.
5. Improve Loading Speeds
Users today are very impatient and expect your site to always deliver prompt loading speeds, or else they’ll quickly head to another site. After all, your users have other more important things they can do with their time rather than waiting for your site to load. Therefore, you should focus on improving the loading speeds of your web pages to boost your site’s conversion rate.
There are different ways you can do this, such as compressing pictures using image compressing software. When using the compression software, make sure to follow the standard rule that starts the longest side should on average be less than 1000 pixels. In addition, all the images on your website shouldn’t exceed 1MB, and this will help to considerably boost its load times. You can also get rid altogether of needless content such as large videos and pictures from your site, which negatively affect the loading speeds.
6. Ensure Your Site Is Mobile Responsive
Smartphones are very popular today and they are most likely the device often used by potential leads when visiting your website. Because of this, there’s a need to make sure that your site’s design is responsive enough to guarantee a smooth browsing experience. This is vital because users don’t have the patience time to wait and familiarize themselves with your site’s norms and design. Instead, they’ll switch to another website. Therefore, you must ensure that your website responds smoothly regardless of the gadget a potential lead is using.
With a responsive site that can be accessed from any gadget, users can easily check for products they want and proceed with the purchase. Thanks to this smooth operation, your site’s conversion rate increases due to the enhanced user experience.
7. Guarantee Website Stability
The primary purpose of having a website is to increase your online presence. However, this can’t be achieved if your site is down often, as it means your potential leads can’t see whatever you’ve got to offer. As a result, they’ll opt to get whatever product or service from a different website.
Luckily, there’s a way you can prevent this altogether, and this is by putting in a great effort during web development. This usually starts with identifying skilled web developers who’re dedicated and serious about providing you with a high-quality and functioning website. Consequently, these experts need to find out other details, such as the time frame within which to complete your project. In addition, they need to identify your project’s goals and objectives. It’s after they’ve figured out such details that they’ll be able to design a stable and functioning site.
8. Choose The Suitable Colors
Creating the perfect website design is considerably dependent on the choice of colors you use. This is because different color combinations can help you better sell yourself to your potential leads, thereby boosting the conversion rate. In addition, your color pick determines how well you can retain visitors as well as your web design project’s theme and tone. Because of this, there’s a need to closely take note of the color you choose for your website.
One of the most important things to consider when searching for an appropriate color is consistency. This basically means that the styles and colors used for a specific product need to be used consistently each time you use the CTA or whenever you mention the product. For instance, the use of bright colors for the CTA and buttons will help improve your site’s appearance, thereby attracting the attention of potential leads.
Another useful hint to help you determine the most suitable color is to look at your product or service. For example, it’s best to use contrasting colors for both the background and text because this helps boost readability and capture a user’s attention.
Takeaway
If your website isn’t compelling enough for your potential customers, this is a clear indication it requires to be improved right away. It’s only by doing this that you’ll manage to boost your online conversions. And to help you accomplish this, outlined in this detailed guide are the basic principles to observe that’ll help you create a high converting site.