When building an effective website, data should always be the driving force in all your design choices. The internet has been around since 1983, which means there is a lot of research on what works and what doesn’t regarding website design.
While your website might be all about beauty, movement, and colors, everything eventually comes down to the numbers. How many clicks will you get if you move your button to the navigation? Which phrasings lead to the most conversions?
These web design insights are drawn from decades of research, data, and analysis that we’ve put together in one handy article. Use this information as a guide to help you make critical decisions in the web design process.
5 Data-Driven Web Design Insights to Improve Conversions
Using surveys, studies, and data from years of research, we put together this list of 5 data-driven web design insights to help your business improve conversions. What’s nice is that these are all issues that every business website deals with, so these web design insights are helpful no matter what type of product or service you sell.
The Color of Your Call-to-Action (CTA)
Want to know something wild? Despite your branding, color schemes, and everything, your brain responds in specific ways to different colors. The color of a room affects your mood, so why wouldn’t the color of your call-to-action button affect you as well?
This graphic from The Logo Company showcases how different brands use colors to elicit specific emotions. Red raises energy levels, while oranges draw lots of attention. Despite this, there still needs to be more clarity in the scientific community about colors and how people react.
A 2017 HubSpot A/B test found that red buttons beat out green buttons by 21%. That 21% affects every aspect of your website, from conversions to page movement. That’s a huge difference.
Using data and research, your CTA buttons need to be bold-colored and contrast your background colors. Secondly, identify the colors your audience does best with and integrate them into your website. Lastly, A/B tests the button colors. Some will inevitably work better than others.
Word Choice Matters for Conversions
PartnerStack, a partner ecosystem platform, increased their conversions by 111% by changing just a few words on their CTA buttons. Rather than “Book a Demo,” they added “Get Started” and immediately noticed a difference.
A HubSpot analysis of 330,000+ calls to action found that personalized CTA’s perform 202% better than non-personalized ones.
Simple, personalized, actionable CTA’s allow you to drive leads to your email list, lead converters, or even products. If the language on your CTA isn’t working, change it up to see if there is any difference. You’ll be surprised what a little wordsmithing can do.
Fast Loading Speed Impacts Conversions
This might sound obvious, but the most significant factor of whether or not someone buys something off your website is directly related to how fast your pages load.
For a truly incredible stat, a five-second loading speed increases the bounce rate by 90% compared to a page that loads in one second. Bidnamic even did their research and identified that for every second faster a page loads, the conversion rate improves by 17%.
Research from Unbounce highlights that 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts whether or not they will buy from a website.
If you’re a business owner looking at what you need to update about your website, page speed must be the first thing you look at. Consumers are not patient, and you need speed when competing against mega-corporations.
To do this, you can do a couple of things on your own, including avoiding page-builder websites like Wix and Squarespace, removing any software bloat on the backend of your website, and upgrading your web hosting.
But to truly maximize your website speed, I recommend working with a website development team. They’ll know the ins and outs of your website to help make it fast on mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Mobile Design is More Important Than You Think
We live in a mobile world where 32% of all United States web traffic comes from phones (the other 60+ comes from desktops and tablets), so if you don’t have a responsive mobile website, your customers will go elsewhere.
If we look at the world, that number shoots up to over 50%.
Responsive web design considers the user’s behavior and environment and develops the websites based on screen size, platform, and orientation. Since so many users scroll through the internet using various devices (and screen sizes), responsive design is essential to digital marketing.
According to a Good Firms study of web designers and freelancers, 71% believe that a non-responsive website is the top reason someone leaves a website (second only to slow loading speeds).
Google cares about your website’s mobile experience. For example, Google Page Insights tracks how fast your website is, and provides you a score between 1-100 for user experience (both on mobile and desktop). How high your score is directly affects your SEO rankings.
The other option, instead of improving your mobile web design, is partnering with a team to develop a mobile app. While helpful, there will be plenty of times when users delete your app to make space for something else. Focus first on your mobile design, then build an app.
A/B Testing to Find Out What People Want
The best way to determine which choice is by consistently doing A/B testing on your website. A/B testing makes two variants of the same web page, buttons, or phrasings and randomly selects users to experience one. Whichever choice brings more conversions or clicks is the winner.
I should note, you can only test one variant at a time. If you try to test a button color and text, you won’t know which of the differences made the impact. Focus only one variation, test, then measure.
When it comes to web design, you don’t know what you don’t know. Another phrasing could skyrocket your numbers for every call to action that’s getting minimal traction.
According to studies, 77% of businesses surveyed said they used A/B testing, with over half of them using it on their landing pages. A/B testing allows you to determine what truly works with your audience and what doesn’t. Don’t underestimate using data to make decisions in every aspect of your digital marketing.
Software such as Optimizely allow you to test variations, products, and digital experiences with results delivered in real-time and at scale. You can test and roll out new features to only select audiences without a full–scale launch. Check to see if any of the digital marketing products you currently use also include A/B testing functionality.
Need Help with Your Website? Contact The Loop Marketing Today.
Whether improving your website speed or designing a responsive user experience, the expert web designers and developers at The Loop Marketing have you covered. And if you want more, our Elevated Marketing services provide you with a whole suite of digital marketing tools from email creation to content marketing.
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