Everyone has an online presence now, so just having a website doesn’t do it anymore. Instead, aim to be one step ahead by looking at how to increase sales through web design.
Following these seven steps will make your website stand out, offer a smooth user experience and give your visitors exactly what they want.
#1: Improve your landing page design
Landing pages are website pages that focus on one product or service in particular.
They are great for SEO practices but also enable you to highlight unique features of your offer, leading to more sales.
A good landing page allows you to zoom in on the benefits and outcomes so more people will buy.
So what does a great landing page look like?
An ideal landing page should have a title, subtitle, hero image, social proof, and a call to action button above the fold.
Below the fold, you can elaborate with more details to convince potential buyers. Good practices include further social proof, an FAQ, and a pricing table.
Not only the content matters, though. The design is just as important, if not more so.
A good design inspires trust and thus leads to more sales. Improve your design by using relevant visuals, lots of whitespaces, and a thoughtful user experience.
In conclusion, creating a few dedicated landing pages is perhaps the best thing you could do to increase sales via your website.
#2: Add social proof to increase sales
We already mentioned social proof as an essential element of landing pages. If you want to increase sales through your web design, you shouldn’t limit social proof to landing pages, however.
Add social proof to your design wherever it makes sense to readers:
- On your home page
- Around CTA buttons
- Around contact or inquiry forms
- Around newsletter signup forms
Why is social proof so important?
People are social creatures and they follow the opinion of other people, often without realizing it. You can play into this by mentioning numbers and praise.
Here are some examples of social proof:
- Written or video testimonials
- Case studies
- The number of users or sales
- Listing reputable clients or publications you’ve worked with
#3: Optimize your CTA buttons
Whether it’s on a landing page or another part of your website, CTA buttons are the most essential part of your design when it comes to conversions.
You can optimize CTA buttons in three ways: the position, the color, and the copy.
In terms of position, you definitely need a CTA button above the fold. Moreover, you should try to always have one button on the screen (for desktop) but avoid showing two at once.
When it comes to color, there is no “perfect one-for-all” solution. Unfortunately, the choice is a bit more delicate as it depends on many circumstantial aspects. But one thing to keep in mind is that your CTA button should be contrasting so it stands out.
Finally, your copy matters to make more people click and buy. In short, you should avoid boring buttons and focus on what’s going to happen after people click.
Some examples:
- “Get a stunning website”
- “Increase your sales by 17%”
- “Optimize your web design now”
#4: Create organized menus
A website menu typically doesn’t get much attention, yet it’s one of the first things website visitors see.
The main mistake most companies make is adding too many options.
If your goal is to increase sales through your web design, you should only link to pages that drive sales.
It’s fine to have an “about us” or “blog” page but it’s better to keep the links away from your main menu as they may distract buyers.
Especially for eCommerce, it may be beneficial to link to products or services that you want to stand out. Alternatively, you can link to broader categories of products and use cascading menus for subcategories.
#5: Make your web design responsive
More and more people use mobile devices to browse the internet. There’s more, many younger people don’t even own laptops or desktops anymore.
Despite this move to smaller screens, many web designs aren’t optimized for use on different screens. In other words, they aren’t responsive.
By making your web design mobile-friendly, you automatically increase your audience and sales.
Here’s how to optimize your web design to increase sales on mobile devices:
- Add lots of whitespace
- Use large buttons and clickable links
- Opt for hamburger menus
- Be careful with small or big text sizes
- Choose a website builder with responsive designs like WordPress.
And lastly, it’s important to remember that mobile devices have slower processors and less bandwidth. This means images may take longer to load and slow down your page loading speed.
Speaking of which…
#6: Reduce web page loading speed
Due to social media and other factors, people’s attention spans have been dropping for years.
This means that many website visitors click away when it takes too long for a page to load. It is said that things start to go South when it takes longer than four seconds for a website to load.
So how do you make your pages load quickly?
- Make sure your website is up to date
- Use light instead of heavy images
- Avoid animations
- Do not host videos on your page
- Choose a trustworthy hosting provider
- Install a caching plugin
- Limit your total number of plugins
- Use a light theme and/or website builder*
You can use a free tool like Pingdom to test your load time for the average user by location.
*here’s how to speed up your Elementor website
#7: Remove distractions in your web design
If the main goal of your website is to increase sales, you should avoid all sorts of distractions.
While this may sound stupid, many people visit a website, get distracted, and forgot why they visited the website in the first place. So you want to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Here’s how to remove distractions:
- Promote only one product/service per landing page.
- Use lots of white spaces.
- Pick relevant images, and avoid animations.
- Have one call to action per page (but multiple buttons).
- Delete any non-relevant menu options.
- Make your web design mobile-friendly.
- Optimize your loading speed.
Furthermore, avoid pop-up windows, chatbots, and other undesired interruptions.
When you optimize your web design for these factors, visitors will more easily find what they want. And thanks to a better user experience, your sales will go up.
#Bonus: social share buttons and quality content for more leads
The above tips focused on increasing sales conversion rates through web design. But first, you need enough website visitors.
The most sustainable way to get visitors, in the long run, is through a well-designed SEO strategy.
A strong SEO structure in combination with high-quality content will drive more visitors to your website.
You could add social share buttons to those content pages to attract even more visitors.
And more visitors, of course, means more sales.
About Clio Websites – Contact us to learn how to increase sales through web design
We hope that this article has given you some useful tips on how to increase sales through web design.
Clio Websites is a full-service website design and marketing company in Calgary. We have loads of experience with responsive website design, website maintenance, WordPress development and support, and SEO. Clio offers free consultations and free website evaluations and we receive glowing reviews from our clients.
Clio is always available and happy to answer any questions about this website launch checklist so don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you need help.
