When modern marketers think of conversion rate optimization (CRO), they often plan to A/B test the CTA button in 10 different ways by inserting even more social proof testimonial boxes and dramatically decreasing every intermediate step before the checkout.
What they often forget is essential to most highly-converting websites: The design and overall visual experience a user has.
Why is design so important to increase conversion rates? How can you improve your website design to boost your conversions? Let us talk about this point in the following topics:
- Importance of Design in CRO
- How to Design a Conversion Machine
- Pro Tip: Infographics as hidden Conversion Boost
Importance of Design in CRO
Humans are visual beings and our eyes are usually drawn to things that are designed well. Besides that, humans are also extremely judgmental based on what they see.
Combining these two aspects and applying them on websites means well-designed websites that attract more attention from humans.
Visually good designed websites will increase user experience, trust, and in the resulting conversion rates. Even researchers from Stanford University found that 46,1% of people consider the website’s design to the top criteria when deciding if a website is credible or not.
Therefore, it is important to design a website that matches certain design principles. While this will not only boost your conversion rate, it will also increase your visibility in Google’s search by improving your user experience.
More organic traffic will then lead to higher numbers of conversions. In the next paragraphs, we will dive deeper into how to design a highly converting website.
How to Design a Conversion Machine in 5 Steps
In the following, you will learn how to evolve your website into a conversion machine by adjusting the design. Follow the 5 steps below:
1. Keep it simple
Simplicity is the key to a highly converting landing page. Take for example Apple’s homepage, their simplicity in design led to one of the most successful brands in the world and countless other companies followed their example.
This doesn’t mean you should cut away all information and explanations on your website. Instead, you should leverage the 8-Second Rule which we will later touch again.
Basically, your website should catch the short attention span your user has to grab all of his attention.
You probably know personally how distracting too much information on a website could be. Remember: Keep it Simple. Creating a great user experience is the key to increase your conversions.
2. Use the right pattern
Most websites use the common F pattern when structuring their website and visual appearance. For texty websites, it could be helpful to use the F pattern. But if you want to build a highly converting website you should also consider using the Z shaped pattern when it suits your content.
The idea behind the Z shaped reading pattern is that your users start reading at the top left of your page at the primary optical area, then follow the pattern to the right top to the strong fallow area.
After that, the eye of your visitor moves straight to the bottom left in a diagonal line and then simply to the right bottom where your call to action is located.
If you have landing pages with less text and strong visuals or testimonials you should consider using the Z-shaped pattern.
3. Use the right colors
To use the right colors for the different sections of your website you should first create a color palette to ensure your schema fits the basic color combinations and your colors communicate the mood you want to create.
Another important thing is contrast. You need to use the right contrast to make your headlines, texts, and call-to-actions noticeable and readable.
4. Make it responsive
Even though most modern websites are responsive on mobile devices, they often lack understanding of user experience and behavior on a mobile device. Just making things fit the smaller screen isn’t enough to hold conversions high.
Ensure to stick to those responsive principles of highly converting sites:
- Less is oftentimes more – focus on displaying one image at a time, rather than just scaling all images smaller in a gallery. You can keep the other images in a scrollable slideshow format, especially on e-commerce product pages!
- Expand instead of scrolling – don’t let your users scroll through infinite waves of content by implementing expanding tabs and navigation menus.
- Don’t hide your CTA – call-to-action buttons should be visible without searching for them, of course, you can insert them after your testimonials and fact sheets but be sure to also provide one at the top.
5. Never stop testing
After you made all visual adjustments you shouldn’t leave it like that forever. Highly converting sites know the benefits of constantly testing their site and optimizing their conversions.
Speaking about testing, A/B tests are probably the most common ones you can use. Google Optimize is a great easy to use tool for A/B testing purposes. Besides that, never forget to also ask your customers about their experience on your website. Don`t be afraid to reach out.
They will be grateful when you improve your website since you would improve their experience as well!
Pro Tip: Infographics as hidden Conversion Boost
Content marketers often see infographics as advanced images to describe ideas and concepts. Overall, business owners use them to communicate their ideas internally, to their existing customers and sometimes for external publications.
Although this is all true, infographics can do much more when you think out of the box.
Here are some statistics on why engaging infographics could boost your conversions:
- People following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions without illustrations.
- 65% of people are visual learners
- The average human attention span is 8 seconds, and our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text. Infographics make it easier to grab your viewer before the next distraction does.
You can utilize all those facts to create engaging pages. How? The simple math behind infographics is: If your readers see the illustrations they will retain the information much better (as mentioned above) which equals to retaining clients who will increase your conversions.
You will be shocked by how much conversions can be increased by adjusting the visual content!
Of course, it is rather weird to implement an infographic on your main page, but you can use them on blog posts and other specific landing pages to get the users’ attention and eventually let them convert much better.
You can use Visually`s Infographic Design Service to receive high-quality infographics on budget and on time.
Written by Timur Köklü, Content Manager at Vectornator
