The top 7 tips for increasing your website conversions

Quick page speed loading time

Page speed is sometimes underestimated as an important factor to monitor, but it is essential if you’re looking to increase the conversion rate on your website. It’s proven that there is a clear correlation between slow page loading time and conversion rate on-site. There are two key ways that it can affect your website: 1) the page takes too long to load and customers end up losing interest, and 2) visitors might think that the site is slow due to it being a fake site, and therefore aren’t willing to give their personal information. 

Ultimately, the quicker your website loads, the higher your conversion rate is going to be. Obviously, there are other factors involved, like the quality of content, and your actual product, pricing, and so on, but page speed is the initial tell-tale sign of a good website and company. It’s important to note that this should be measured continuously for the longevity of the website to ensure it’s always above Google’s recommended page load speed.

Easy customer journey

This isn’t always easy to test, and even harder to get it right, but it’s very important to make sure that your customer journey is as stress-free and easy as possible. Your customers should have a fluid journey through your site, all the way to the transaction stage. 

Some key things to look out for when mapping out your customer journey are non-essential steps or pages that bring nothing to the journey, repeated questions or questions that sound too similar, non-effective CTAs, and overall difficulty in navigating the website. 

Top tip: It would help to review the customer journey regularly and see where customers are facing issues and how you can help to change these for a more positive journey. A good way to do this is to use HotJar, to see where your website visitors are having the most problems with your site, and customer surveys that can provide you a direct insight into their likes and dislikes of your site.

Secure website

We all know why a secure website is important, especially when it comes to conversion rates. If a visitor doesn’t feel that your website is safe and secure, then the likelihood of them entering any of their personal information, like credit card details, to purchase is very slim. 

Website security has become more of a talking point of late, with media outlets reporting on scam websites and big companies like Facebook being targeted.

Top tip: It’s very simple for websites to add extra security to their current HTTP which will flag to Google and users that the website is safe for browsing. Encryption and top-end payment methods are also a great way to ensure your website is extra safe for your visitors and customers.

SSL certification

This encryption service is tied very closely with the website security metric. An SSL certificate allows for data between your site and the customer to be transferred in secure encryption so that the transactions are safe for both customer and merchant. 

If this is something you currently do not have it would be a good idea to get one as soon as possible as it will help with your website ranking on Google. The algorithm favours websites that are secure and actively maintain a safe browsing environment for the customers and this is one of the metrics it looks for. Not sure if your SSL certificate is set up correctly? Use StatusCake’s SSL monitoring for easy checking. 

Reducing pop-ups

Removing any unnecessary pop-ups may not seem like an important thing to look at but it has been proven again and again that this impacts the user experience on the site. When this happens, customers are more likely to exit the website and therefore, lower your conversion rate.

With the new Google algorithm that has come into effect this month, websites that have very large pop-ups that cover the majority of the content on the page will be penalised and in turn, will reduce their rankings on the results pages. If you didn’t think it was important before now, this will surely make you pay more attention to this once you see your SEMRush alerts filling your inbox.

Clear page layout

Something that website owners commonly forget about when reviewing their page is if the layout makes sense to the customer. Yes, you may have all of the content you need, you have CTA buttons scattered around and you have your product’s best features on show, but does the layout spur the customer to click onto the next page or to convert? 

We tend to forget that once a page is designed it continues to work to make sure that it performs to the level we expect and this can only be done by regular reviews and changes. Customers will not always behave the way we expect them to, which is why it’s so important to make changes that will increase their interaction with the content.

It could be a very small change from your side that can increase the interaction on the page. Maybe you can reduce the text amount to make the page more easily digestible or make the page an easier colour on the eye so users find it simpler to navigate and thus spend longer on it. Whatever the reason for your page, make sure that this is something that is monitored regularly.

Easy payment buttons

If you have an e-commerce website, then it’s essential that you make the payment option easily identifiable for customers. You need them to be able to continue to the payment page quickly and easily, without having to spend seconds hunting for a way to get there. 

As website owners, we all want customers to spend as much time on our website as possible but there is nothing worse than getting visitors to your website but they can’t seem to complete the payment. It’s one of the easiest ways to lose customers and unfortunately, to make sure they never return. 

Up-selling is great but it’s also very important to make the customers’ experience on the website easy and smooth so they can return. A great example of this is Amazon, which worked endlessly on choosing the colour of their Pay Now button. They eventually settled with orange, whilst other brands opted for the common CTA Pay Now colour of green. The reason? Amazon conducted months worth of testing on a variety of different colours for this button and found that orange converted far higher than any other colour on their palette.

Enhance your website performance

These are just 7 points that are easy to implement and measure, and that should be the very foundation of your website. Big e-commerce companies have teams dedicated to website design but whether you’re one of these or an SME, there is no reason why you shouldn’t have all of these in place before looking deeper into your conversion rates.