Conversion Rate Optimisation is the process of working to increase the speed (or likelihood) of gaining conversions.
For example, an online flower shop might notice that they sold flowers more often when they mention that they were grown locally on each page. Adding this text would be optimising their conversion rate, as it is seeing what makes sales more likely and implementing it.
Other classic examples of CRO are abstract changes like testing different button colours, or more direct changes like trying out different CTAs (eg “Learn more” vs “Discover how”).
Conversion Rate Optimisation Top Tips
Here are some of the simplest Conversion Rate Optimisation tips:
1. Use images with human faces on your website.
A website without any actual people on it can tend to feel “scammy” or impersonal to the average visitor, as they have no one to relate to when visiting your site. When you’re building a website with the aim of generating a high conversion rate, it’s a good idea to include images of real people performing actions related to the nature of your business. If your budget allows it, you should use original photos. Otherwise, stock images are a good backup option, so long as you choose photos that aren’t too generic or have been used by more established websites before.
Make sure your images aren’t too large without lowering their quality.
You may have taken care to include some high-quality images on your website, in an effort to avoid disappointing its visitors. However, they’ll end up disappointed anyway if your website is taking too long to load – a surefire way of losing what could’ve been your customers.
It’s understandable if you’re initially hesitant to use compressed images, as they can at times be grainy. But you can make high-definition images smaller without any kind of remarkable drop in quality using an image optimization tool. You can use a free tool like Optimizilla to compress your images.
Use the right fonts for your website.
If you’re aiming for your website to be taken seriously and you’ve presented its textual content using a font such as Comic Sans or Papyrus, chances are your website visitors are going to make a judgement based on that font choice and may leave and look for a better, more credible looking website to check out rather than yours.
When building your website, you should make sure that the font you choose for the text is as professional-looking as possible, whilst still feeling relevant to your market.
With so many font choices available nowadays, it’s entirely up to you which fonts you choose to use on your website as long as they mix and match together. You can use a font pairing tool to make the mixing and matching of fonts easier.
Ensure your website is as clutter-free as possible.
If your website is too full of call-to-action buttons, images and text, its visitors may feel that you’ve done a sloppy job of building your website. This, in turn, can cause them to decide to visit your competitor’s website instead. Thus, you should ensure that your website has just the right number of call-to-action buttons, images, and text in it, so that you’re able to get your point across without overcrowding the page. It’s also advisable to make use of whitespace in order to reduce website clutter.
Use the right colours for your website.
Every colour has a specific meaning. There’s a risk that if you use the wrong colours for your website, you may inadvertently drive visitors away. Picking the right colour scheme for your website can be challenging. One way that you can make the process less difficult is to perform A/B testing. The idea here is that you show website visitors two versions of your website with different colour schemes and establish from the data collected which version is driving a higher conversion rate. You can use tools like Google Optimise to achieve this.
Make your website mobile-friendly.
With more and more people using smartphones and tablets to access the internet, ignoring these users while building your website could be the worst business decision you make with your website.
While smartphone and tablet users can technically still access your website if you’ve only designed it with desktop users in mind, they will have a much harder time navigating it and viewing its contents. On the other hand, if you’ve gone to the effort of optimizing your website for mobile devices, there won’t be any need for smartphone and tablet users to zoom in to find your call-to-action button, as they will be able to easily see it after a few scrolls – or even immediately after the page has loaded.
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