Getting a lot of traffic to your website is excellent, but it’s only half the battle. If those visitors aren’t converting that traffic doesn’t mean much. Getting a conversion is the other half the battle.
A conversion depends on your business needs. Conversions can be a contact form submission, a phone call or a product sale.
This is a decision that you should make based on what you want your website to do. So, once you’ve made this decision, how do you get conversions?
Let’s take a look at what can help to improve your website conversions.
Slow page loading times will increase the exit rate of your website. Meaning that people won’t stick around to check out your content. But, what’s the ideal loading time? It should be under 2 seconds. Any more than this and your bounce rate will increase for every second that your site takes to load.
There are so many great tools out there that you can use to check the loading speed of your website. Such as; Pingdom, GTMetrix, or Google PageSpeed. Not only can you check your page speed here, you can also check what affects scores. One huge thing that affects site speed is image size. Where possible, you should serve images without scaling them down. Make sure that the image is the correct size when you load it to your website. You can also use a tool like Optimizilla to compress your images.
Compression minimises the size in bytes of the file without reducing the quality. Sending images over the internet takes up time, cutting down the file size reduces the time taken. In turn, making your website load quicker!
Another way to improve your web speed is to minimise the amount of HTTP requests. p, things like images, stylesheets (CSS), and scripts can take up, up to 80% of load time. That’s huge. GTMetrix can tell you how many HTTP requests that your site is making. To reduce the amount of requests that your site is making, you will need to minify and combine files. Once you know what those requests are, you can start the process. Minifying files is simply removing unnecessary code, whitespace, and formatting. Getting rid of extra space in your code means that your browser can read and load your site much quicker.
Combining files is exactly that. Your site will most likely run lots of CSS and JavaScript files. Combining them into one makes them, again, much quicker to read. If you use WordPress, there are many plugins out there that can minify and combine your files.
Having a website that works across all devices is of the utmost importance in today’s age. As technology advances, the way people surf the internet does too. Your website should be fit for everyone.
First things first, you should ensure that your website works across all devices. If your website doesn’t, this will increase the amount of visitors leaving your website before they have found what they needed. Search engines like Google, will notice a high “bounce-rate” and penalise your rankings.
You should always test your website on the devices that it’s intended for. Simply scaling down your browser size may not provide you with the result that a tablet or mobile does. Remember to always test your devices both portrait and landscape.
Usability isn’t just about whether your website works across all devices. You should also ensure that your website is easy to use for users of all ages. You should think about whether your content is easy to read and also if your website is easy to navigate.
Aiming your website at an older audience doesn’t mean that their reading age will be higher. It’s important to understand that it may be lower than you think. Considering this means that your website will likely be usable for a wider audience.
If you’re not sure what age that you write at, a good tool that’s available for free online is the Hemingway App. A website with clear and easy to read content would site at a reading grade of 8 or lower. Keeping your content at this low grade will ensure that it’s easy for your users to find CTAs and convert!
Aside from content, you should also take into consideration the design of your site. Although you may want something fancy and out of the box, if your website has an unfamiliar layout, you could lose conversions. Researching your competitors and up-to-date website design can help you stay on track. I offer WordPress website design as a service and would be happy to help, wherever you are in the world.
You should complement your good web design with a simple payment process. If you are selling products through your website, a complicated payment process could lose conversions. Two plugins available for WordPress are WooCommerce and also PayPal’s Buy Now Button. If you want to take payments through your website, ensure you have an SSL certificate to add that extra layer of security. This will help to protect your customers against potential hackers. It will also give your customers peace of mind when purchasing products and avoid them leaving before they have started.
A CTA or Call to Action is an instruction to the user, designed to prompt a response straight away. These usually include text like “Call Now” or “Find Out More”. CTAs should allow the user to easily navigate through your site, leading to a conversion. Too many call to actions can confuse the user, resulting in no conversion.
User groups will respond differently to particular calls to action. Until you test them, there’s no assurance that one will work better than the other. So, how do you test your CTAs? Split testing or A/B testing is a fantastic way to gauge the effectiveness.
A/B testing is the process of testing two versions of a CTA on your web page. By changing the wording or colours on your CTA, you will attract different audiences. This testing can help you to understand which CTAs work best on your site. It can also help you to improve your site metrics including; clicks, form submissions or sales.
Some WordPress themes like Elegant Theme’s Divi, offer built in split testing. This allows you to cut out the guesswork, providing data to help you optimise CTAs on your site that convert the most.
To get started with A/B testing you’ll need to know what you want to test. As mentioned above will be relevant to your business. It will be anything that appears on your site including headlines, page copy, buttons and more.
Once you have set up your test, you will need to observe and collect the data as this data is vital to your next steps. Once you have this data, you will be able to make an informed assumption about your results and how you can improve. And example of how you could do this is as follows:
Issue: There are not enough people clicking submit on the “Free Quote” form. This may be because the button to access the form is not distinct enough.
Proposed solution: We should amend the design to ensure that the button stands out more.
Proposed success measurement: We will know this works when we get a 5% increase in quote requests in the next 30 days.
If your proposed solution works, you can then run the tests again. This will allow for further refinement on your CTAs, leading to better results. A/B split testing is a vital part to marketing your website and gaining those much needed conversions.
Last but certainly not least, put in place conversion tracking on your website. The data that you gain from this tracking will help to analyse where users are leaving your website. It will also show you if users are not using your CTAs or if they aren’t scrolling far enough down pages.
By tracking conversions on your site, you can analyse and understand how users are navigating your site. This can then lead to understanding where there might be obstructions.
I offer many web services and would be delighted to assist in moving your website forward. Contact me today for an informal chat about why your website isn’t converting as much as it should be.