Each and every element on your website, starting from the fonts to the colors and even the positioning of the buttons have an impact on your conversion rates. A user’s interaction experience with every single element determines whether they want to stay further on your site or bounce away, and this affects your conversion rates.
Your team always takes an extra effort to ensure that your target audiences reach your website while ensuring that there is increased traffic to your site – but sometimes, this is the end of the story, i.e., there happens no further progress after the visitor reaches a site. This ultimately leads to a decrease in conversion rates.
What is User Experience?
To be precise, user experience (UX) is the pattern of behaviors that a customer displays when they interact with a specific website. A number of factors influence user behavior and their experience, including website design.
A good UX is that which satisfies the user, and the satisfaction comes from enhanced accessibility, usability, and efficiency that a website provides whenever the user interacts with it.
With an improved UX, you are creating a pleasant environment for your user to interact with your brand. And this, ultimately guides your website visitor through the conversion funnel. If everything goes as planned within the conversion funnel, prospects turn into leads and finally, leads turn into customers.
Let us boost conversions and not bounce rates. For that, we need to improve the UX of our website. Here, we will take you through some of the actionable UX tips that will help in improving the UX of your website, thereby increasing the conversion rates:
Know Your Audiences: Find Out How they Navigate and Click
Unless you have a clear idea about user behavior, how do you improve the user experience? So this is where you can start. Understand what people do when they land on your website. This would help you to prepare strategies for optimizing your site better for future visitors, thereby improving conversions.
Scroll Maps are one of the best techniques to find out where people stop scrolling. This will help you to understand the areas where the user activity is weaker. On a Scroll Map, you will find various colors assigned to each area based on the volume of activity happening there.
Red and white colors are assigned to those areas where people spend most of their time, and these areas are referred to as hot spots. Similarly, the color yellow is also used to indicate hot spots.
Dark blue color indicates cold areas – here, there was either minimal or no activity. These are the areas through which people scroll through quickly or exit instantly. Apart from the dark blue color, teal and black colors also indicate reduced activities or cold spots.
Green color indicates the areas that are in between the hot and cold sections. Though various areas experience a varying level of engagement, it is generally noticed that the activities across the ‘hot’ areas do not last for long. It is because most of the time, this is the point where people find something to click through – which means no further scrolling is needed here.
‘Impressions’ on a Scroll Map bring you the highly viewed sections of your web page. Once a visitor stops scrolling across a section that is in the viewable area of the browser, this section of the web page will receive an impression.
So if the visitor scrolls across the body of the page and stops at the footer, only the footer will receive an impression, while the body will not receive any impressions.
Use Scroll Maps and determine where people spend most of their time on your site, and also keep a note of the cold areas so that you can work on fixing the concerns here.
Intend to Use More Than One Call-To-Action? Learn to Separate These.
Our main intent is conversion. Call-to-actions (CTAs) carry the key to conversions. Of course, you can have more than one CTA if that is part of your business objective. However, the arrangement of these CTAs is one of the UX factors that you should be careful.
Both are important and are intended to bring conversions. Placing one on top of the other is highly confusing and never recommended. But, when both are placed far apart from one another, the one that lies at the far bottom has lesser chances of activity as the first one would be always the user preference.
If people don’t understand why these CTAs are here and do not click through, then the UX is not good enough.
In very few cases would people want to click through the second CTA as well. How do we balance this?
Write a strong copy – not long ones – but precise and clear ones for both your CTAs. The importance of both the CTAs should be well-explained in one or two sentences, along with what they are going to lose if they choose to click through only one, but not the other.
The copies should convey why it is required that the user to click through both, rather than confusing the user, which might force them to leave without taking an action.
Homepage: Is It Important?
Yes, it is one of the most important aspects of your UX, which determines conversion. This is one of the pages, where your visitor lingers more than other pages. So it is important that it be unique, while also including some of the website’s main messages here. This will actually give the users a better idea of what are some of the main objectives of your business.
Also, it will help them understand that they are at the right place and soon, they would find a fix or solution for their concerns. But remember not to cram in a lot of information and annoy your visitors – although make it a point to not leave out the most important details. Again, good UX is not about overcrowding your homepage with a lot of information.
In fact, people don’t even like to read, so small and precise copy with the most important details would be sufficient.
More importantly, since a homepage is where the users land for the first time – in the majority of the cases, it should be clean and appealing – with the most vital information organized clearly. If it is crammed in with a lot of information, people won’t stay for long. They will leave, which will impact your conversions.
Listed below are a few points to remember with regard to your homepage in order to offer a satisfactory UX, which will improve conversion:
- Ensure that the copy is short and simple.
- Ensure that the most essential information is placed above the fold on your homepage.
- Connect all other pages of your website with the homepage.
- Also, remember to link your logo with the homepage.
Page Speed: Do Your Web Pages Load Faster?
Firstly, understand that your visitors are impatient. They have no or the least interest to wait while your site takes all the time in the world to load.
Visitors want a website to load within three to four seconds of landing on a site. If your site’s load time exceeds this, the UX is not helping and ultimately, it will affect your conversions.
Though this is a standard expectation, some of the studies show that 87% of visitors happen to leave if the site doesn’t load within two seconds. For instance, sites such as Amazon load in the blink of an eye – the prospect of losing a business could be really harmful on conversions.
Businesses like Amazon invest in faster and reliable servers to ensure that the users do not have to wait for ages till the site loads.
Here is a tip – ensure that your servers are faster. If not, replace the existing ones with the best ones so that you need not compromise over the quality. Also, if your site uses bigger images, you can compress these, as bigger images usually prevent the sites from loading faster. Our aim is to provide a great UX, and the site’s loading speed contributes to this.
Improving the page load speed for desktops is not sufficient, it has to be improved for mobile as well.
So to check whether your page loading speed is appropriate, you can employ certain online tools, which will help to check whether your website is delivering a speedy user experience across various platforms.
One of the best tools is PageSpeed Insights from Google. On the tool, enter the URL of your site. All the areas where page speed is weak will be highlighted and also you will be provided with suggestions and solutions on how to fix these.
Designing a Clear CTA
We have already discussed including more than one CTAs into our web page and how to separate these. But here, we are going to take a better look at how to design a perfect CTA for your website.
CTA buttons on website guide users to conversion. Some of the examples of CTAs include ‘start a free trial’, ‘to download the app’ or ‘download the app here’, ‘sign up for updates’ or ‘subscribe to our newsletters’, ‘book an appointment’ and so on.
It is important to have a clear and appealing CTA for your website, as it helps in improving the user experience of your website. The best practice is to place the CTA on every page of your website.
On websites that have a clear and compelling CTA, the conversion rates are really high because when the CTA is high, it ultimately ensures a great user experience.
It is always recommended to have the CTA placed above the fold so that it is visible to the users. Also, it is observed that most readers do not tend to read below the fold. So having the CTA above the fold always helps.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind when designing CTAs:
- Does the color of the CTA have an impact? Yes, it does have an impact. Colors help to make the CTA stand out and attracts people’s attention. It is always a best practice to implement contrasting colors in your CTA when compared with the color scheme of the web page for which it is being designed.
- Action-oriented CTAs are game-changers: One of the best practices is to avoid using passive verbs in your text. Always, ensure that you are introducing active voices. Because the text should lead the user to take the desired action.
- Is there a limit to the number of words? Yes, there is a limit to the number of words that can be included in a CTA and it should not exceed more than five words.
Ensure that your CTA is clear, visible and stands out giving your people a reason to click through, which will increase the conversion rates.
Do You Have Images or Videos on Your Website?
We mentioned earlier that if there are bigger images on your website, it might tamper with the page loading speed. However, compressing these larger images will help to improve the page speed.
But here, we are going to discuss how images are part of good UX and how it helps in increasing conversions.
The visual appeal of any web page is enhanced with the presence of images and/or videos. Isn’t it? Images and videos are capable of grabbing user attention instantly. It is also capable of leading to increased user engagement. The kind of images or videos you choose would determine whether your design appears good or bad.
When it comes to images, the first thought that comes to our minds is stock photos. These are cheap and very easy to use. But are these reasons good enough? It is possible that people would have already seen the images that you are using. This is because Stock photos are accessible to all.
So it doesn’t look real though it looks professional. We should focus on humanizing and this you can achieve easily by using some realistic images on your website.
It is more about creating a human touch rather than leaving your people with the impression that they are interacting with robots. There is proof that the conversion rate increases by 102.5% if you include an image of a happy customer on your homepage instead of a stock photo.
When using videos, be careful because again, a video can bring down the load speed of your website. But there are certain situations, wherein using a video rather than text is inevitable.
For instance, if your product comes with numerous functionalities and features – it would be a tedious task to explain it in words. Unless people understand how your products function and how it can be used, why would they buy it?
But a video that explains these functionalities and features would have an amazing effect on your people. Because here they get to see and listen rather than force themselves to read through when they are impatient to read. Videos boost customer engagement.
So next time, think of including a video to explain your product works and to guide your user through its functionalities, rather than cramming in a lot of information.
Catching 404 Errors
When it comes to searching, as users, we all prefer to land exactly on the specific page that we were searching for. So what do you do when you encounter an error, specifically a 404-error, mostly? It is simple – we navigate to another site because we are impatient and want faster service. That is what users do.
Apparently, it is not possible to avoid 404 errors completely. But the fact is that it will drive users away from your website. So how do we deal with it?
Firstly, it is important that you find out for which of those searches are 404 errors displayed? Once you find these, quickly fix ‘em.
But there might be those cases among these wherein you cannot avoid 404 errors. So in these scenarios, rather than having your site navigate to the standard ‘404 error: page cannot be displayed’, customize these messages – use text that users find to be attractive and friendly.
If you plan to use images, ensure that these are relevant, appealing and maybe, a little fun so that these do not annoy the user.
The users want a better and smooth browsing experience, which can be achieved by personalizing the error text that would be displayed – and if you can add a personalized touch to it – then great.
We might not be able to get rid of these error messages completely, but it is always possible to fix the not-found errors – by adding a personalized touch to the messages – which is a good UX practice.
Including Search Field
Imagine you land on a website and you are trying to find something you wanted. You look around for a while and you can’t find what you wanted? What would you do? You will be annoyed and you will leave the site.
So if a user leaves your site because they couldn’t locate whatever they wanted, then the UX is not good and it will not contribute to increasing conversions. No one has the time to wait for someone to turn up to help them locate what they want and that is not a feasible option often.
Ultimately, they will visit your competitor’s site. If your is a bigger website with a lot of content, it is always recommended that you include a search field.
Position your search field at the top right corner such that users can find it easily. Also, make the search field wide enough so that the entire search query is clearly visible to the user.
For instance, let us think of the Amazon website if it does not have a search box, how would people find what they were looking for.
Include Contact Information
What do your users do when they have a question or query upon arriving on your website? How do they reach out to you? If there is no contact information, how do you think your people reach you? That again is a bad UX if your people don’t find contact information to reach you.
If they can’t reach you with their queries pertaining to your product or service, why should they buy your product? This means they will leave. Each time, a person leaves, it impacts your conversion rates.
When people are interested in your product or if they have any related queries or concerns before making a purchase, they would obviously check for the contact details. In such situations where they want further clarification, they look forward to reaching out to you.
So it is important to provide your contact details as it ensures that no potential or existing customer leaves because they could not find a way to reach out to you as you didn’t provide the contact details.
Providing a prominent contact link makes it possible for them to reach out to you. Also, this is important if they are to believe that your business is genuine and reliable.
Make sure that you have the below-listed information on your contact page:
- Company name
- Contact number
- Email address
- Contact address
The contact information helps your customers believe that you are a legitimate company and that they can trust you.
Also, you can offer a confirmation when the form has been submitted – this will not keep them wondering whether you ever received the message. Now, they can go back happily knowing that they would get a response soon.
Accessible from All Devices
One of the most important and decisive factors of any UX is responsiveness. It is imperative that you have a website that is accessible across all devices – ensuring that the websites can adjust their layouts on the basis of the audiences’ screen resolution, regardless of whether they are using a desktop, smartphone or tablet device.
Implementing responsive design will ensure that your website looks beautiful from all devices.
Unlike the traditional old days of the web, when accessing the internet was limited to just one device – the personal computers – today, the scenario is different. People are connected to their devices, including their mobile phones or tablets from anywhere at any time, accessing websites.
What happens if your website is not accessible from a mobile device? Not everyone would want to take the pain to browse your site from a computer. This means that people would think of leaving the site and visiting a competitor’s site available over their mobile device. From the conversion perspective, this would again bring down the numbers.
So in order to ensure that you are gaining more potential customers, ensure that your website is responsive.
Would you like to check whether your site is responsive? You can check it here.
Website Design and Content Improves UX
One of the best things you can do to improve the UX of your website is to have a well-designed website with a relevant content copy, that is, compelling as well.
The quality of design influences how the credibility of a brand is perceived. Along with it, the content copy determines a website’s success when it comes to converting users.
Once these two factors have been taken care of, it is important that you work on the other points that we discussed earlier to ensure that your users are happy. This will help to turn them into leads and finally, into customers.
Tracking Conversions
The conversion rate is a measure of how many visits out of the total visits on a site turn into a conversion. This conversion can include online purchase, a form submission and even a phone call based on the business objectives that the website is promoting. Conversion rate also helps you to get a better understanding of how well your website is performing.
It is always important that you track these conversions. For this, you need to have an understanding of how to access your website’s analytics and set up the goals. You can track user interactions using heatmaps and conversion funnels.
Now, you have sufficient data for analysis. On the basis of your analytics and the data relating to user interactions on your site, you can create insights on the volume of conversions happening in each area. Analyze why certain areas have a lower conversion than others and why certain areas have a higher conversion. Check what can be done to improve conversion.
Apply the tips we discussed earlier and then track the conversion data. Now, you have a better UX, high conversion rate and finally, better sales, leading to growth in business.
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