How to improve your conversion rate with a killer UX design

Let’s imagine you’ve created an eCommerce site with clever, concise, and engaging copy. You’ve pulled in assets that are not only visually enticing, but informative. You’ve included great content — from videos to infographics — that tells your brand story perfectly. 

And yet...you’re not seeing results. The prospects who land on your page simply aren’t converting! 

Why? 

Despite all your best efforts, if the user experience (UX) design of your site isn’t carefully crafted, it could fall flat when it comes to conversion. Does this sound familiar? Although this was just a hypothetical, for many businesses this scenario is a reality. UX and conversion go hand in hand, and design considerations should remain top of mind as your business works to reach its next growth milestone. 

4 tips to improve your UX for conversion

From the time a user first lands on your site, you have somewhere between 3 to 5 seconds to convince them to stay. Appealing copy and engaging imagery are important, but equally as important is how they land on the page. Sites with seamless and intuitive UX designs will make for a better user experience, meaning a substantial increase in engagement and conversion rate. 

Anchor your content around a clear, bold, and action-oriented call to action

Behind every site is a goal. In the case of most eCommerce stores, your goal is to convert would-be customers who visit your site to purchase a product, with the hope that they will return to make more purchases. Every part of the business — from conversion to engagement to revenue and profits — will depend on how your website addresses this goal. 

This is where your call-to-action (CTA) comes into play. Whether it’s in the form of a button (“Buy Now”, for example), plain text, or even imagery, you should spend some time thinking about how you want your CTAs to look. In the case of buttons, you’ll want to consider characteristics such as colour (believe it or not, some colours have been shown to convert at higher rates) and associated text (choose catchy and actionable words like “Discover” or “Start”). 

Where you place the CTA is just as important what you include in it. You may have heard the term “fold” used in marketing circles: this relates to what can be viewed on a website’s page without having to scroll up or down. Content that’s placed above the fold — that is, where you don’t need to scroll — is viewed 84% more compared to content that falls below it. If you’re still debating where to place your CTA, here’s an overwhelming indicator that you should place it above the fold!

Users prefer video content over huge blocks of text

The internet is becoming more and more video-centric. Users simply don’t want to spend too much time reading on your site, particularly if your audience is Millenial or Gen X.

Situations in which you have a lot of information to convey are practically tailor-made for the video format. It’s been shown that videos on landing pages tend to increase conversion rates — and it makes sense! Videos can not only communicate a company’s value proposition but do so in a way that’s engaging and holds a visitor’s attention. Again, be mindful of the placement of your videos (you guessed it: placing them above the fold will likely result in more conversions).

Focus on readability and white space

Once you’ve narrowed down what copy you want to include on your site, you’ll want to make sure it’s readable. To be clear, we’re not just referring to how legible it is. The font choice and size (18-point tends to be best for UX readability), as well as paragraph breaks play an important role as well. Given that most users are likely to skim your site’s written content, at least at first glance, you’ll want to ensure the text is easy to read. 

Just as important as the text itself is where you don’t have text. White, or negative, space really speaks volumes about the design of your site overall. A balanced ratio of white space to content will increase user attention and ultimately provide a better user experience. White space also makes your content easier to read and navigate, so make sure to leverage this underrated element of UX design as much as possible.

Speed is the name of the game

According to a now classic study, 40% of desktop site users won’t wait longer than three seconds for a page to render before leaving; for mobile, it’s 53%. If your site takes 4 seconds to load, you’re out of luck: those users, along with their conversions, could vanish. For that reason, site speed — today more than ever — is crucial to keeping users on your site. Not only that, but it will also affect your organic search rankings. If those aren’t enough reasons why you should focus on site speed, we don’t know what is!