How Web Design Affects Conversion Rates
Good web design isn’t just about creating a website that looks nice. While aesthetics are, of course, very important to how your brand is presented and the first impression that you make on the customers that visit your site, the two main concerns of any business website should be to increase traffic to the site and increase conversion rates. A business website that looks good and is well-designed has the best chance of achieving these. Your business website’s design does a whole lot more than simply create a good or bad first impression on users. Here are some of the main web design factors that can either increase or decrease conversion rates.
Responsiveness
Today, people view websites on lots of different devices. So, a website that only looks good on a desktop might only get good traffic and conversion rates from desktop visitors. But more and more people are using their smartphones and tablets to browse, which will harm conversion rates overall. A website is thought to be responsive if it is easy to view on all of the major screen types including desktop, mobile and tablet. If users struggle to read content and see images on your site when they’re viewing it on their mobile, chances are that your traffic and conversions will both drop.
Navigation
How the website’s navigation system is designed can also have a significant impact on the conversion rates. When a site is easy to navigate, users are more likely to be able to find what they need quickly, which ultimately results in faster sales and more conversions. On the other hand, if users are visiting your website and struggling to get around, they will be more likely to leave the site before they’ve even found what they were looking for.
Simplicity
A website that has an overall simple design tends to be easier to navigate as well as easy to understand. Most successful websites today will have quite a simple yet informative design that is based on solving user problems and providing answers to questions. On the other hand, a complex or busy design with lots of different colors, tabs, images and graphics might leave users having a more difficult time of trying to figure out exactly where they are meant to go to get the information or product that they are looking for.
Load Time
The design of your website can also impact its load time, which ultimately has a massive effect on whether or not users are converted to customers. A website that is designed with a lot of large graphics, images, and video files is likely to take much longer to load than a simple site. But no matter how great it all might look on your site, the sad truth is that users aren’t willing to wait for it. Most will give you a couple of seconds before they decide to give up on waiting for the site to load and try somewhere else instead.
Calls to Action
Calls to action or action buttons are a crucial part of any website when it comes to boosting the conversion rate. They are simple additions to a website’s design that stand out from regular links and catch the eye of the viewer for the right reasons. Strategically placing action buttons on your header, the hero image of your homepage, and underneath any text descriptions or images of what you offer can be a simple yet really effective way to encourage customers to buy, and for conversion rates to rise.
Web design isn’t all about looks. The way that your business website is designed also plays an important function in marketing your business to prospective customers and increasing conversion rates.