Believe it or not, great web design can make an enormous difference to online sales made through your website. This doesn’t just mean the look of your website, but the way it functions and the experience it provides to the user. Here are 8 ways you can improve your web design and see increased sales:
1. Improve navigation. The easier and simpler it is for customers to see a product and purchase it, the more likely they are to click ‘checkout’. Get rid of those unnecessary steps and make the navigation on your website lovely and streamlined.
2. Demonstrate your credibility and trustworthiness. Customers will only buy from a website they can trust, so make sure your website is beautifully designed as this will give it credibility. Demonstrate trustworthiness by displaying as much official accreditation as you can, use a recognised system for taking online payments, and look into becoming a trusted website with Google.
3. Always bear your target market in mind. In order to improve sales through your website, you need to be able to visualise your ideal customer. Create buyer personas, based on the characteristics of your main customer groups, and use these as tools when designing your website, as well as launching email and digital marketing campaigns.
4. Simplify the e-commerce process. Go for large links and icons, make the shopping cart nice and visible, and offer confirmation at each stage of the purchase process to reassure customers.
5. Show off your products/services with beautiful images. It goes without saying that if you want customers to buy your products, they need to look stunning on your website. Go for high quality images and let them do the talking, but make sure they don’t slow down page load time.
6. Answer questions before they’re asked. To reassure nervous buyers and enable visitors to get the answers they need in order to make a purchase there and then, make FAQs a top priority – you can even add ‘hover over’ help icons next to anything you think visitors will find tricky so that they don’t have to go to a separate FAQ page.
7. Give each page a clear purpose. Every page of your website should have a clear purpose, which means that each has a ‘most wanted’ action that you want visitors to do. You need to create a visual hierarchy, where your call to action – be it ‘buy now’, ‘give us a call’ or ‘download our free guide’ clearly stands out.
8. De-clutter. This tip follows on from the previous one, as you need to remove unnecessary text, images and other content so that your main message, your call to action, can shine through.
What are your top tips for boosting sales through improvements to web design? To what extent do you think web design actually plays a part in sales and conversions? Please feel free to share your thoughts.
