What Makes a Website Convert Well?

by | Sep 8, 2020 | Web Design

Website conversions can be a little tricky in some cases, but they are also directly tied to your revenue.

That’s why it’s important to strive for perfection, as doing so will allow your business to reach its full potential.

In this article, we are going to take a look at what makes a website convert in the first place.

This will allow you to tweak your website accordingly to increase your conversions.

Before we continue, we recommend you check out our guide on the purposes of a website.

So, What Makes a Website Convert Well?

Conversions are affected by a huge number of factors, but the main ones that we are going to cover at are:

  • Offer
  • Trust
  • User Experience
  • Layout
  • Call To Actions
  • Branding

If you get these right, there are very good chances that your website will perform well. Before we talk about these factors individually, it’s important that you understand your conversions are affected by all of the factors above.

That means just aiming to get one or two of them right probably won’t be enough, you need them all.

Related: How To Make Your Website Profitablee

Offer

The first and arguably most important factor is your offer(s).

If your visitors don’t see the benefits of your offer, it’s not going to convert. For this reason, it’s so important that you clearly outline the benefits of your offer on your website.

Features are cool, but if there aren’t any benefits, most visitors aren’t going to convert. The benefits are the perceived value of your product and therefore have to clearly be communicated to visitors.

If your offer doesn’t have clear benefits to your users, you may want to tweak it or target another audience.

However, in most cases, you’ll just need to be a little clearer and bolder in the language you use on your website when talking about how your product or service can help your audience.

Trust 

If your visitors don’t trust you, they’re not going to convert either.

There are several little tricks that can help you gain your visitors’ trust, but one of the main ways is social proof.

Social proof includes everything from testimonials to reviews and it just shows your visitors that others have purchased from you and have been happy with what they have received.

If others have been satisfied with their purchases, it just confirms that you are trustworthy.

Another way to add trust is through showing off previous work, case studies, and anything else that proves your expertise or skill level. Strong branding also helps with trust, as it gives the visitor a feeling of knowing you better.

For example, if you were to go on Amazon and order an item, I would doubt that you have any trust issues with Amazon. The better your branding, the more visitors will trust you.

User Experience & Layout 

If using your website is a horrible experience, visitors are also not going to convert.

Here are some factors that affect the user experience:

  • Site speed
  • Layout/Navigation
  • Technical errors (i.e 404 errors, etc.)
  • Design
  • Content

The user experience on your site is made up of all these factors.

I also wanted to talk about the layout because a user could have the best experience but if your website doesn’t push them towards a page that can convert them, they’re not going to.

For this reason, it’s important that you use a good internal linking structure between your pages and that your site is easy to navigate. Not doing so, could be harming your conversions.

Call To Actions

Having CTA’s on your website is a must.

They let your user know what you want them to do and if you’ve followed the rest of the tips in this article, they’ll quite often do it.

What I mean by that is that CTA’s will work best if everything else is on-point too. If you’re on a website that you don’t trust and it says”click here” you’re probably not going to follow the instructions.

However, if you just finished reading a blog post which you got a lot of value from on an awesome-looking website that asks you to click to learn more, you’ll likely do it.

CTA’s are essential, but they won’t do the job on their own. 

Test, Test, Test! 

Last but not least, you’ll also want to test just about everything that you can test.

The only way of finding what converts best is by testing everything.

Here are some ideas of components that you could test:

  • CTA’s
  • Your offer
  • Layout & internal links
  • Social Proof
  • Pop-ups

Although if you are going to be split-testing a lot, it’s important that you don’t get too caught up on the minor things like colours. In most cases, these will have a very small impact.

If you test everything, you’re bound to find the highest-converting version of your website.