When it comes to your conversion rate, you may not have thought about how your site’s design factors in. All too often, designers and developers are trying to put together the slickest looking pages, with the most up to date web technology, and as a result, they forgo considering a visitor’s experience. When designing any site, it is critical to consider things from the visitor’s point of view. Doing so can be the difference between visitors converting to customers, and visitors leaving without making a purchase.
A common pitfall in site design is to make it too complicated. How many times have you visited a site, and had to click through a landing page animation? While the site designer probably spent a long time putting together a cool Flash animation, and while they certainly thought it would attract attention, typically, these things annoy visitors. When you visit a site, you are looking for specific information, not flashy animations. These types of design elements can turn visitors away before they even get to your product page.
As well, some site designers employ ads that automatically play audio and video, or they include music that plays in the background. Not only can these design elements become annoying and turn people away, but they can also slow down loading times exponentially. And some designers do not even include a function to turn off these audio and video elements, leading to visitor frustration, and no conversion.
Yet another design flaw that is often overlooked by designers and developers is the checkout process. If you have gotten a visitor to attempt to make a purchase, you are on the right track. However, if they get to the checkout and can’t figure out how to complete the transaction, they will be even more frustrated in the end, as they have just spent time on your site, they found what they wanted, but now they can’t purchase it. Having a poorly designed checkout system is essentially thumbing your nose at the customer, telling them that you have what they want, but they can’t get it.
In the above examples, the designer simply did not consider the user’s experience. Companies spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours per year on focus groups in order to figure out what customers like and what they don’t like. Why? Because the customer is the entire reason for going into business. When people visit your site, you want them to purchase something, not leave. And if your site is poorly designed and not engineered for a comfortable user experience, not only will customers not make purchases, but they will not come back in the future. Your site may even gain a reputation for its poor design, leading to a bad reputation.
Eric Wyatt writes on social media and internet marketing, focusing on conversion rate optimization and landing page design.