9 Web Design Principles and Can’t-Miss Elements of Conversion

Are you making the most of your website? If all you did was get a design made and put it up, you’re missing out on potential sales.

An estimated 52% of companies who use landing pages optimize their pages for conversions. You should be doing the same thing.

You need to include the elements of conversion if you want to increase your sales. Below are nine design principles that will help you boost your conversion rate.

1. Good Headlines

If you expect a customer to click on a link to visit your website, you need to give them a reason to come. Your headline is what will provide them with that reason.

The good news is that you can change how your headline appears to people looking through search results. This process is done with your meta-title and meta-description.

Use these tags to tell search engines what to display to their users. You want to create a headline that targets the keyword your page is for and assures users that your page has the answer.

2. White Space

You want your visitors to focus on a specific part of your website when they visit. It’s hard for them to do this if you bombard them with a ton of information.

Make use of white space to minimize the distractions on your pages. With fewer places to look, your visitors can focus on the content you want them to pay attention to.

You can still add extra content after the user has learned about your product. You just need to make sure that your added content has its own section away from the information your visitors want to see.

3. Mobile-First Design

Mobile users make up a lot of internet traffic today. You need to have a website that looks good for these users. If you don’t, you’re missing the mark with a lot of your user base.

Your web design and development service can create a mobile-first responsive design to handle this for you. Your design is created for mobile devices first. Once you finish your mobile design, you can start adding the elements for desktop users.

It’s easier to add to website design than remove elements of it. This process will provide you a better-designed website that costs less to maintain.

4. Simple Color Palette

It’s easy to forget about color when designing a website. Your color scheme can invoke emotions in your visitors. You want it to be simple enough for your colors to be effective.

It’s recommended to stick with two colors for your primary color palette. Any extra colors will run the risk of distracting your visitors and dropping your conversion rate.

You can start testing your colors on the different sections of your website once you finalize your main color scheme. A few changes here and there can help increase your conversion rate.

5. Video Backgrounds

It’s hard enough to get someone’s attention on the internet these days. If you drive users to a landing page that has nothing but text, do you really expect them to stick around?

A video background can help your landing page stand out. You can use it to keep people more engaged with your website and better tell the story of your brand.

These videos are typically placed where your hero banner goes. They start playing as soon as the visitor lands on your page.

6. F Patterns

You want your visitors to see the most critical information about your product as soon as they land on your website. It’s vital to know how people read if you want to give them this information before they decide to leave.

The F pattern is the typical method that people use to read a website. People start by reading left to right. Once your visitor finishes, they scan down the middle and read towards the right again, drawing an F with their eyes.

You can use this pattern to put your best content in these spots.

7. Reduce Your Page Size

You can’t afford to have a slow website when many of your visitors connect from mobile devices. There’s no guarantee that they will have a fast connection.

You run the risk of losing visitors if your website takes more than a few seconds to load. Why should people wait for your site when they can go somewhere else and get what they want quickly.

You can start by reducing your image sizes. There are tools available that will compress your images without sacrificing any quality. Once you reduce your image sizes, implement lazy loading on your website, so images don’t load until your visitors scroll down on your website.

8. Reduce Choices

Have you ever tracked how much effort it takes for your visitors to take action on your website? If it takes someone too long to accomplish anything, you could be losing sales.

Try to reduce the number of choices someone needs to make.

Take your product pages, for instance. Do you want to throw a bunch of products on the page and tell your visitors to find what they like best? Or do you want to show people your most popular products and try to make the sale on those products?

9. Prominent Call to Action

You have an expectation about what someone needs to do when they land on your landing page. The question is, does your visitors know what that is?

Make sure you have a clear call to action on your pages that tell the user what they need to do. Some of the typical things are checking out a product, signing up for an email list, and making a phone call to your business.

Don’t Forget to Add the Elements of Conversion to Your Website

There is a lot more to making a website useful for your customers than making it look good. You need to put in the work to make sure it’s a place people want to buy from. Use the elements of conversion above to get started.

Are you interested in learning about more ways you can use your website to build a loyal following? Keep reading our blog to learn all the tricks of the trade.