Designing a website can be a tricky process. It is not just about the code or the design aspects. Having a website that visitors love is a combination of several factors and for affiliate marketers who aim for higher conversions, having the right website design must be a high priority. We bring you below 6 web design problems that might actually be hurting your conversions. Read on to learn more.
Navigation
So, you’ve invested a lot of time and money into ensuring that your website has the latest design which makes it shiny and amazing to behold. However, if you still cannot see the conversions pouring in, it is time to take a step back to ask why. If your landing page has all the information with great graphics but is missing a ‘add to cart’ button, you are in trouble.
Navigation through a website and its pages must not be a troublesome experience for today’s fleeting web users. Bad navigation is a major issue in web development. Try and ensure that you create a website design that makes it simple for the user to navigate through all your pages and still not have an issue with finding his or her way back to the start.
Page Load Time
While design elements are an important part of converting visitors, a far more pressing matter is the speed at which your page loads. Website users will simply not wait for longer than a few seconds while waiting for your page to load. This might mean that marketers have to skimp on all the bells and whistles; however, it will be a wise investment. Also remember, page loading time plays a role in where your website shows up on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Everything else being the same, a web page that takes more time to load is accorded a lower position on the results page.
Call to Action
The call to action button is the most important part of the landing page. However, care should be taken to insure that it is not placed too prominently on the page while making the other aspects smaller. While this might work in some special cases, more often than not, the visitor will choose to ignore the big button sitting in the middle of the page if he/she cannot access more information located around it.
Try and provide ample spacing on your landing page. Do not clutter it with too much information before placing a big call to action bar as well. Offer clear graphics, a navigation bar with more information and the ability to direct away from the landing page as well as back to it. Experimenting with different color schemes usually does the trick.
Visuals
Visuals are perhaps the most important part of your landing page concerned with conversions. From the visitor’s point of view, a visual is far more preferable than thousands of words which they would willingly avoid. However, do ensure that your visuals are not too heavy or require the visitor to spend time browsing through them for information. If you have complicated charts and tables on your landing page, chances are, the visitor will mostly ignore them and sign up or abandon the page altogether.
This basically negates the use of visuals in deciding conversion altogether. A simple thing to do would be to put up information about the duration of any multimedia content you are posting on your page. A video that shows a preview, as well as an approximate length, is far more likely to be watched than something which gives no sneak peek and takes a long time to buffer because of its length.
Site Maps
A sitemap is a vital component of search engine optimization and tells Google and other search engines what pages are on your site. It helps them to find content on your site, which improves the chances that users will find what they are looking for. The most commonly used sitemaps are XML Sitemaps, HTML Sitemaps, and Robots.txt files.
Interactive Content
Web pages that contain static text or long videos and photographs are fast getting outdated. Contemporary website designs today try to incorporate a high degree of interactivity to keep the visitors engaged. With keyboards becoming less popular with every passing day as the preferred means of input for web users, designing pages that offer interactive content is one of the main aspects of getting those conversions.
Besides the above points, there are several other things you can do to increase conversions on your website. For example, adding a simple ‘contact us’ form along with a street address and a phone number could help increase conversion rates by 2% as the folks over at Less Accounting found. According to SMB DigitalScape, in 2012, 60% of small businesses online did not have a phone number listed while 75% lacked an email address.
While the situation has improved drastically in the past two years thanks to several authority websites explaining the importance of providing contact information on websites, it is still something that many marketers forget to include.
Finally, it is also important to ensure that you have factored mobile traffic into your calculations when building your website and/or landing page. Mobile-driven traffic is far more likely to convert than normal desktop users if they like your page. There is a sense of urgency in mobile users which is often missing in others. However, the battle is lost even before it begins if your page is not designed to load on smartphones or other mobile browsing devices.
Final Thoughts
Keep the above tips in mind and implement them in order to get your stagnating conversion rate moving. In case you are making any of the above mistakes, it is very simple to solve website design problems. Just take some time out of your busy schedule and fix them. Once you have fixed them, you will notice a significant improvement in your conversion rates.