Conversions are the goal of any landing page or business website, but did you know that it may not be your copy that’s the problem? Web design plays a significant role in conversion rates as the best copy in the world won’t work as well if it’s surrounded by an ugly, slow, and dysfunctional design.

Let’s look at six highly effective design tricks you can use on your sites to boost your conversions. Get your A/B tests ready and follow along!

Images

Images are a must, but they must be done smartly. Low-quality images or images that are irrelevant to the offering will damage the impression you give to the visitor. It’s well worth the time to learn some things about digital photography so you can get some great shots, like these shots from Schwan’s, a home food delivery service. Here are some quick rules for image use:

• High-quality photos only. Avoid bad stock photos!
• Show photos of the products and/or people enjoying the product or service. Put products in their context and show humans using them.
• If you have products, show the product from different angles and use clickable thumbnails to let the reader browse through them.
• Consider whether a zoom feature in your page’s image display might be worth it.
• Use images in your site navigation.

Landing pages without images are boring. Landing pages with bad images are a waste of money. Bring on the photos, be smart!

Decrease Decision Time

People say they love choice, but some clever scientists found out decades ago that the more choices you present someone the longer and harder they have to work to make a decision. This is called Hick’s Law.

If your aim is fast conversions, you shouldn’t give your visitors too many options. If the number of possible decisions is low then they’ll be able to decide quickly what to choose while they are still interested. There’s a good reason the show “Let’s Make A Deal” only gave contestants a maximum of three choices. It kept the emotional urge to continue high.

However, if the decision by its nature is a complex one, minimizing options to force a decision won’t work as well. Some niches just need to present more choices so people feel comfortable making a decision. Car dealerships are a good example.

Experiment with reducing things like:

• The number of calls to action
• The number of visible products per page
• The number of links in each navigation dropdown

You might be pleasantly surprised at the results.

Page Speed

It may seem like an insignificant thing, but if your page takes more than four seconds to load, you’re losing a lot of your potential customers. After 4 seconds, 25% of your visitors have already left your page to go do something else.

Fortunately, it’s really easy to check your site for speed fixes. Google has created a handy tool to help you discover tweaks you can make to improve site speed. Each second you can shave off of your load speed can boost your conversions by 7%, so don’t tolerate a slow page load.

Mobile Experience

The trends are clear. Mobile users continue to increase, which means your site cannot ignore mobile experiences anymore. Just take a look at this infographic from ImpactBND to see why. A few highlights:

• Mobile users 5x more likely to abandon a task if the site isn’t optimized.
• 52% of mobile users say are less likely to engage with a company with poor mobile experience.
• 80% of searches done by mobile phones convert.

You must have a good mobile experience at this stage to remain competitive. In fact, it would be better to give it a higher priority than the desktop if your aim is conversions.

Navigation

If your customers cannot find the information they want then they will leave. It’s as simple as that. Navigation through your site should be extremely clear. This post from Kissmetrics has some great examples of good and bad navigation that can help you clean up the worst things.

However, sometimes the best navigation is no navigation at all. If you are building PPC landing pages, giving users a chance to navigate to the rest of your site is an invitation for them to bounce away from the conversion. If you’re going for the hard sell, don’t give them any option to leave.

Calls To Action

Speaking of buttons, let’s talk about calls to action. If the goal is to get the visitor to convert then that process must be made as clear as possible. If visitors have to hunt for the conversion button or opt-in form you will lose them.

Don’t make your readers go through your entire sales pitch before reaching the conversion point at the bottom of the page. Always put one call to action above the fold. Make it easy to find and clear about what the user will get. For instance, if you are offering a free eBook in exchange for an email address, don’t have the button say “sign up now”, have it say “Get my free eBook”. If your sales page is long, then it’s okay to add other calls to action along the way so readers don’t have to scroll back up to the top to convert.

Examine your landing pages in light of these design tricks. Are you following them? If not, give them an A/B test and see if you get an improved conversion rate. We think you’ll get a nice bump from making a few tweaks to your site design.