Working in West Chester PA web design has taught us a few important lessons when it comes to increasing sales through your website. An important statistic we like to throw around is that you have less than twelve seconds to capture the attention of your customer. It doesn’t matter if you’re an eCommerce website or a hair salon, these tips should help every industry. If you don’t have a website and want some help, we are the leader in Philadelphia web design and would be happy to discuss how we can help you. This article is primarily for people who have a website that just isn’t converting as well as it should. There are loads of potential problems that may be affecting your website’s ability to convert into more sales. Without actually going in and taking a look there is really no 100% accurate way to know what may be hindering your conversions. That being said, here are five solutions to common problems we’ve seen in the past:
Number One: Improve Your Website Speed
Website speed is the specter haunting many of the websites we’ve seen in West Chester PA web design. It is even more critical than it seems on the surface, poor website speed can also seriously hinder your website’s Google ranking. Fixing your website speed should be the first step you take to increase your conversions and will often be the step that makes the most impact. One of the many problems we see working in West Chester PA web design is that people can’t tell whether their computer is the issue or their website is what is holding them back when it comes to loading times. Luckily there are a few proven methods to figure out whether your website is loading in as fast as you’d like. You can head over to Caveni.com/quote to ask us to help in person or you can use a few of our favorite tools to help:
https://tools.pingdom.com/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Don’t get too overwhelmed when you see the results, there will be a lot of technical jargon that is difficult to understand and you may be surprised if the tools are giving you something like a 72/100. Be very careful with the Google tool, as it is known for giving bad scores even if your website is performing great. The only thing you want to focus on is the website loading time. Anything below four seconds is good, four to eight is questionable, and anything over eight is starting to get into the danger zone. Don’t pay any attention to the other information the tools give. Now that you’ve had the chance to actually see your website speed. You may be asking; How do I improve my website speed?
For the purposes of this blog we will focus on improving WordPress website speed, as around 30% of all websites are built in WordPress. Other websites built in different frameworks will often require far more serious revisions and fixes to work properly, so for the moment we will put those on the back burner. There are a few easy ways to improve the speed on your WordPress website. Our first suggestion is to install the WP Rocket Plugin , this plugin will help with your website caching and provide you with a few additional seconds off that load time if your website is currently not optimized. Our second method is more involved; optimizing your images. You image could be too large in size or as a file, the easy way to test this is to go to the “media” section of your website and take a look at the file size. As a general rule we try to get everything to around 200kb or less, though you can often get away with around 500kb on smaller websites. This can be accomplished directly in photo editors or you can go to a website that is built to compress images. Hopefully this will help you make your WordPress website faster. If you’re still having trouble don’t be afraid to contact us and ask for help!
CTA refers to a “Call to Action” normally in the form of a button or form. In the case of your website we would highly recommend having both as they are immensely important in driving your users into your sales funnel. Best practice when it comes to CTAs is to have at least two per page with three on longer pages. Normally you should have your first CTA in the form of a button near the very top, for your home page it should be essentially the first thing you customer sees. You should have a second CTA roughly at the bottom near where you footer is, this will allow a customer convinced by the rest of your sales content to enter into the next stage of your funnel to eventually come to the moment of sale. With longer websites we suggest a third CTA in the center as a way to break up your content and move along users who may not scroll back up or down if the page is too long. Convenience for you user is the priority when it comes to your CTA placement. A convenient buy button will cause your sales to skyrocket. Our experience in West Chester PA Web Design has proven these concepts again and again.
Provided by Websolutions.com
Number Three: Make it Easy to Navigate for Your Users
Navigation and ease of use stand paramount among increasing your conversions, how are your users supposed to buy if they can’t find the cart? They aren’t. Making your website easier to navigate normally comes down to decluttering things like menu bars and fixing the way your website interlinks. Poor structure is a common problem in West Chester web design. The structure of your website should resemble a silo or even a funnel. It may be called the world wide web, but your website shouldn’t take that too seriously. The easiest way to fix your website structure is to organize your menus into sub-menus, if you have six services, make one service category on your primary menu with 6 sub-menus for each of your services. Organization is a hugely underrated part of increasing your site conversion rate, but failing to adhere to the basic principles of site organization is surefire way to lose out on more sales. This is a consistent theme we’ve seen in West Chester PA web design. A great way to test the functionality of your website is to talk to friends or associates and ask them to get to a specific page. See how difficult it is for your average user to navigate your site and you will know how friendly it is to potential customers. If you’d prefer a more rigorous testing method there are companies that offer those services like Usertesting.com. You can also get into touch with us for a full free website audit.
Trust is very fickle on the internet, the amount of scammers and unskilled individuals peddling fraudulently advertised services has really reduced consumer trust in online services. A powerful tool to create trust is, reviews. We’ve received feedback before about the seemingly random placement of reviews on a page, clients have wanted a full page just for reviews and no other reviews on the site. That method simply does not work, while it can’t hurt to have a full page of reviews you will see a far greater rate of conversions by having reviews nearby to your CTAs or even included in the same section as a prominent call to action. The optimal rate is around 3 reviews per page, normally different reviews on each page is also best. West Chester, PA Web design has rampart failures in web pages failing to correctly utilize reviews correctly on their websites. Review placement can occasionally be a hard fix for some people, as it often requires a web designer or designer. Luckily we are here to help if it ends up being too complicated!
Number Five: Display Credentials and Demonstrate Expertise
Demonstration of your expertise will go a long way towards establishing client trust and getting them to make the leap to purchasing. Something as simple as having an active blog page will go a long way toward establishing trust between yourself and your potential clients. We recently wrote a blog about writing SEO friendly content here at Caveni that can help with the writing side of the content creation equation. We’ve also written about the most common SEO ranking factors. Establishing a blog is the easiest way to start to display expertise for your customers. We’ve also found, through our own independent client research, that having clearly displayed statistics are up to 12% more likely to increase conversions on a page. So don’t forget to throw some numbers into that blog as you write!
Blogging is only one of many methods that you can undertake to increase your appearance as an expert in your field. Showing expertise can include everything from posting on social media to making YouTube content that your audience wants to watch. Whatever you can do to get your knowledge out there will help as long as you provide examples on your website. Our advice is to create valuable content until you can’t create anymore.
Provided by Cision.com
West Chester PA Web Design Conclusion
You conversion rate represents the very lifeblood of your business, increasing it as much as possible should be your primary goal when it comes to your website. The most successful businesses on the planet all spend over 5% of their budget on conversion optimization. Hopefully we’ve made it clear that you should be spending the same amount, if not more on your own West Chester PA web design. Our experience in West Chester PA Web design has given us a very clear image of what needs to be done to ensure that a website is capturing as many conversions as possible during its lifetime. While we haven’t been able to go over all the conversion methods inherent in all good web design, you should now have a good base of knowledge to increase your sales today! If you have any questions, concerns, or need help with something; head over to our contact form.
