5 resolutions to boost your website conversions

New beginnings, new perspectives, 365 new days—the new year is a symbol of hope and optimism. This is the perfect time for businesses to reflect on their past setbacks and successes, and draft a solid plan for the rest of the year. Whether you’re a small business owner, an entrepreneur, or a blogger, your website is your business. So before mining your brain for stellar ideas to improve your business, join us in resolving to get the basics right—optimizing your website.

What’s a new year without resolutions?

Resolution 1: Test lead generation forms and make them more user-friendly

Your sales team needs more leads, your marketing team finds ways to generate leads, and your business thrives on the number of leads you convert. Agreed! And lead generation forms are your go-to solution.

But how do you create forms that convert?

• Design forms to match your purpose: You use forms for different things, like webinar and event registrations, landing page promotions, demo requests, and more. Make sure you have relevant fields, questions, and the required information in place. If it’s a demo form, you might need a calendar field to know when to schedule a demo for a lead. Or if it’s a webinar form, you’d need a time field, so your webinar registrants can choose a session based on their time zone.
• Test, fix, repeat:Test your forms to find fields that are hard to fill in, ones that take a lot of time, and those that repeatedly create errors. This way, you can identify elements that are putting your visitors off, and make your form more lead-friendly. If a lead takes time to fill in a particular field, see if you can change the messaging, or if a field generates errors, clearly state what’s causing the problem.

Resolution 2: Have clear and meaningful calls-to-action (CTA)

Your website will get different types of visitors—leads, customers, partners—and you can’t have one common CTA that fits them all. Having a simple, compelling CTA can go a long way in improving your visitor’s interactions with your website and, in turn, increase your conversions.

• Create CTAs for different objectives: A CTA shows visitors what they ought to do after landing on your page—so make sure you have a compelling one. Chalk out the objectives for your page so you can design a CTA that goes well with it. For example, if the webpage talks about an upcoming event, your objective is to get people to register for it—have a CTA that says “register for <name of the event>", or if you want visitors to know more about the event, change it to “Read the agenda”. This clearly tells your visitors what they need to know.

• Test the placement, color, and text of your CTA: Let’s not dive into the top-fold vs. bottom-fold debate just yet. Instead, AB test two variations of the page and see for yourself which position, color, or text works well for you. This again depends on your visitors and objectives—if it’s a blog, having a CTA at the top might not work, as you’re asking a visitor to sign up before they’ve read anything. You can also create goals to identify which CTAs give you better conversions.

Bonus: Generally speaking, don’t use CTAs like “click here” or “submit,” as they confuse visitors and do more harm than good to your conversions. Also, don’t go overboard with calls-to-action—stuffing a page with too many CTAs will confuse or annoy your visitors.

Resolution 3: Put out content that’s precise, yet informative

Believe it or not, content is still king when it comes to contributing to a business’s success. People come to your website to learn more about your business and make important decisions—let your content do the teaching.

• Write what visitors want to read: According to a study by Brafton, the average time spent on a webpage is 2 minutes 17 seconds. That means, your content has to be catchy and meaningful to entice your readers in such a short span of time. Interact with your visitors using simple content and wrap it up with a neat call-to-action. You can use heatmaps to identify how your visitors engage with each section and tweak the content accordingly.

• Stop repeating facts or text ad nauseam: Your content needn’t always be salesy—use good content to build a community of readers for your brand. Splashing a page with facts and numbers will make your brand look needy. For example, if visitors come to your blog often, it means they want to learn industry best practices or read topics that interest them—write in a manner that will benefit them.

Bonus: Write for humans and not just bots—don’t load up on keywords when it’s not required. SEO is important, yes, but quality content will speak for itself.

Resolution 4: Make sure the site design is easy on the eyes

Your website’s design is the first thing your visitors see. A poorly designed and aligned website will increase your bounce rate and kill your conversions, so make sure you design to impress.

• Communicate your brand through design: 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual. So visitors are going to remember your brand visually, and that’s the reason you can recognize brands by just logos or colors. Choose the color scheme and images for your website based on what you want your brand to convey so people will easily remember you.

• Use visual cues to grab attention: Set the contrast right and highlight parts of the page you think are important for visitors. Use images that back your text and help visitors get the context. You can set scrollmaps to see how far visitors go on your webpage, identify where visual cues work better, and rearrange elements for better conversions.

Resolution 5: Get a layout that’s easily maneuverable 

How many times have you lost track of a page while browsing a website? The lack of a proper layout will do that. A consistent website layout can speak volumes about your brand and help you gain your visitor’s trust.

• Guide your visitors: Imagine you’re a travel guide and you have thousands of tourists—and it’s your duty to lead them through their journey. It’s similarly important to guide your website visitors and offer them a seamless browsing experience. Add breadcrumbs so visitors will know where they currently are and how to go back to previous pages.

• Analyze navigation patterns: Use funnel analysis to identify how visitors traverse pages and identify where they drop. This will help you create a smooth transition for visitors and get interactions going.

Have you made any resolutions to boost your website conversions? Feel free to share them with us in the comments below!