7 Web Design Hacks That’ll Skyrocket Your Website Conversions

When you’re running an online business or a website, the most important way to generate more customers for your business is to drive more traffic to it.

And there are lots of ways to do this. You can use content marketing, paid to advertise, or social media marketing.

However, not all the visitors that land on your site will buy from you. It’s the sad fact of digital marketing. According to WordStream, a typical website conversion rate is about 2.35% on average.

This means that for every 100 visitors your site gets, only 2 to 3 of them will make a purchase. As such, you need to focus on creating a website that is fully optimized for conversions if you are to raise your conversions to a more profitable level.

Since your website is your chance to impress potential clients, here are 7 simple web design techniques that will help convert more of your visitors into customers.

 

1. Take advantage of negative space

In web design, the space occupied by different elements in your web pages is called positive space, while the unused space is called negative space or white space.

When designing a website, amateur designers will try to cram as much as they can into the little space each page offers. This leads to noise and makes it hard for your offers to stand out.

Too little white space increases cognitive load, and many visitors will simply browse to another website.

As a smart business owner, you should ensure that you have as much negative space as possible. Negative space allows your most important elements such as calls to actions and links to important pages to stand out among the other elements in your page.

To increase the white space on your website, break up blocks of text into shorter paragraphs, use lists and bullet points where appropriate, and use media such as images to break up your text.

 

2. Use the right color combination

Color is often overlooked by most designers when they’re trying to build a website. However, choosing the wrong colors is detrimental to your conversions.

Research done in web design shows that 85% of consumers cite color as a determining factor in purchasing.

There is no one-size-fits-all color for all websites. However, the combinations of colors you use determines the emotions and reactions you elicit from a visitor. Always use a combination of colors that elicits the right emotion for your brand.

In addition, using one or two colors for your website is a bad idea. It limits your ability to highlight important elements such as CTAs which your visitors might overlook when scanning your website.

To increase your conversions, choose at least four colors. One color scheme for your background, another color for your text, a different color for important links on the page and most importantly, a highly contrasting color for your calls to action.

Using highly contrasting colors for your CTAs draws more attention to them and increases the chances of your visitors finding and clicking them. This will gradually increase your conversions.

 

3. Simplify your navigation

It can be tempting to add a link to every notable page or resource on your navigation bar.

Will doing this increase the number of clicks to these pages? Yes, it will.

But having too many choices on your navigation bar also clutters it and distracts your visitors, reducing the chances that they will click on the links that send them to pages that are important to conversions; such as your pricing page.

According to Econsultancy, having fewer choices on your navigation bar makes it easier for your visitors to find what they are looking for.

The position of your navigation bar is also crucial to your conversion rates. Navigation bars that are placed in the header of your website convert more than those placed on the sidebars and footer areas. This is because they are easier to find.

 

4. Avoid standard or free templates

Every content management system comes with free website themes and templates, and many business owners try to cut costs by using these templates and themes.

While not all free themes are bad, it’s good to keep in mind that these templates were not created with your specific business in mind. They’re also overused and not updated as frequently as premium or custom templates. A free theme makes your business website look cheap and reduces your abilities for customization by offering limited features.

When designing your website, you need a design that is unique to your brand, and you also need themes and templates that will be updated regularly to fix bugs and improve their functionality. You cannot do this with free templates.

To get a custom theme that you can customize to your heart’s content, you need a professional web designer. They will not only create a theme that is personalized to your specific audience and business, but also offer you free customer support and theme maintenance depending on your agreement.

The ability to increase your website’s conversions by tweaking your theme to fit your brand is one of the biggest reasons to hire a professional website designer for your site.

 

5. Use animated CTAs

Calls to actions are one of the essential elements of highly converting websites.

Don’t believe me? This is what statistics say.

• For KISSmetrics, a CTA within a video gets 380% more clicks than their normal sidebar CTAs
• Adding CTA buttons to article templates can increase your revenues by 83 % in one month

While calls to action are important, how you present them is the determining factor of their impact on your conversions. For example, using button CTAs instead of text-only CTAs can increase your clicks by 45%.

However, animated CTAs work even better. Their movement draws your visitors’ attention and increases their chances of clicking them. According to UserTesting, a subtle movement every few seconds gets your visitors’ attention without being annoying.

 

6. Use high-quality visuals

Human beings are visual learners.

Research shows that the human brain retains more information when it is in a visual format such as images and videos than when the information is in text format. If you want to increase the amount of time that visitors spend interacting with your website, you need to use images and videos as part of your copywriting.

While images and other graphic media are important, quality matters more than quantity.

Your visitors will pay more attention to images that contain relevant information than on generic images that don’t add any value.

As such, before you chose a stock photo to use when designing your website you need to ask yourself whether its quality is good enough to attract your visitors’ attention.

The two main ways to get high-quality visuals is by using a photographer or using an expert graphic designer. Graphic designers can create any type of image or video you need, and the result will always outperform any stock imagery you can get around the internet.

While hiring graphic designers from freelance sites is cheap, it also puts you at the risk of receiving low-quality visuals. This is due to the low barrier to entry into these sites, which allows amateur designers to work there.

The solution is to avoid freelance sites for graphic design and hire a professional graphic designer instead. They may charge more, but the images you receive will come in handy in increasing your website’s conversion rates.

 

7. Focus on responsive web design

Research shows that mobile devices account for about 56% of consumer traffic. This means that most of your visitors are using mobile devices such as tablets and phones to browse your website.

The problem with the shift from desktop browsing to mobile browsing is that not all websites have incorporated mobile responsiveness into their designs. In such cases, a website loads well on a PC but turns unresponsive once a visitor tries to access it on a mobile device.

When a website isn’t responsive on mobile devices, most visitors will not stick around; they will look for another website; which means that your conversions and revenue plummet.

To prevent this, you need to hire a professional web designer for your blog. A good web designer will create a website that is responsive both on PC and mobile devices, meaning that you will start enjoying high conversions regardless of the device used by your visitors.

 

What next?

Now that you have learned the seven web design hacks that will skyrocket your conversions, the only thing standing between you and the conversion rates that you want is taking action.

Head back to your website right this minute, look at what elements of your website need to be improved and invest your effort and resources into these areas. If you cannot do it yourself, you can always hire a reputable web designer to help you redesign your website in a way that drives conversions and increases your revenue.