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Is Poor Web Design The Reason Behind Your Conversion Decline?

Business owners can’t afford to overlook the benefits of having a professionally designed website

Photo by Pixabay

Did you know that you could be having the best product in the market and fail to attract the right clients? It only takes 50 milliseconds for potential clients to make a buy decision. Attracting or bagging clients, also referred to as conversion, plays a key role in your brand’s success.

Without the right appeal, the chances of outdoing your competitors are next to nil. A good website acts like a well-groomed and well-kept salesperson marketing a product. Web outlook is the key determining factor for a good website. Always remember that the first impression is everything and according to research, 94% of your site’s first impression is dependent on the web design.

What’s impressive is that most business owners understand the benefits associated with all that, and yet choose to ignore it.

Why Businesses Fail to Invest in a Good Web Design

The following reasons show why business owners fail to invest in a professionally designed website.

  • Annoying Business Attitude  — Owners of successful businesses, especially small businesses, build the outfit from scratch to its maturity. They run the company’s daily affairs, including handling finances, human resources, and other technical affairs. This makes them have a know-it-all and self-sufficient attitude, believing they can run their site on any design.
  • Limiting Budgets — Most entrepreneurs would rather invest in things they know to be more beneficial to the business than an expensive site. Lack of funds forces them to make this misinformed decision.
  • Lack of Worthy Competition — Suppose a successful business rival has a well-designed website. In that case, competitors will be forced to invest in well-designed sites to survive the game. In addition to that, research shows that 57% of the internet users confessed that they wouldn’t recommend businesses with poorly designed portals

Features of a Professionally Designed Site

A business portal may be said to be professionally designed if it has the following features:

Updated Blog

A good portal should have a blog that addresses questions that potential clients could be having about your products. It should feature topic such as:

  • Products catalog
  • Products prices
  • Benefits accruing from the use of your products
  • How to use products

Research shows that clients are likely to browse through the blog and determine its credibility before making an informed sales decision.
As they say, content is king. A business interface should have content that attracts and finally converts visitors to clients. Keywords should be used appropriately to bring traffic to the site. 38% of your visitors will exit if the content layout is unattractive.

According to WP Superstars, a bad website leads to a bad user experience

For SEO purposes, the content should be unique and original. Search engines can easily detect duplicate and low-quality content leading to low ranking. As a result, your brand visibility is negatively affected.

Ease of Navigation

Visitors to your site should be able to navigate with ease. Never make potential clients work for information. Images and audios should be of high quality to improve user experience and meet the needs of the disabled. 

The interface should have a good layout for simplicity and increased customer interaction. A serious business person should be keen on this point because 88% of the consumers will not return to your website after a bad user experience.

A responsive site addresses the following issues:

  • Expected answers to users requests
  •  Loading time which is a major cause for high bounce rate
  • Site navigation 

Research has it that 39% of buyers aren’t patient enough when there are loading issues.

Optimization

Sites optimized for SEO have a higher possibility of ranking on the first page of the search engines which makes their brands appear credible. Responsiveness is another factor that can’t be ignored. Research shows that a site’s ranking is highly dependent on its responsiveness and with a slow loading page, you may end up losing 4.3% of potential clients. Ensure the website responds to clients’ questions as expected.

The relevant photos, videos, and content help your audience navigate the portal more easily which plays a key role in improving user experience. Being an inbound strategy, SEO is effective for both B2B& B2C lead generation.

Moreover, when your site is properly optimized for SEO, customers can easily find your business on the internet. This helps in advertising your business and improving brand awareness.

If a site is optimized for SEO, it means that all the features of an optimized site, as discussed above, have been included. On the other hand, non-optimized sites are faced with the following challenges:

  • Failure to attract the desired audience to their sites 
  • Poor user experience
  • Low brand visibility
  • Low business growth
  • Poor conversion rate
Security and Uptime

Ensure your website is SSL secured. An SSL proxy helps to encrypt communication between clients and your site. Potential clients will leave your website to avoid exposing themselves to malware, phishing, or hack attacks. With 64% of businesses having experienced web attacks, you should make sure your site doesn’t expose clients to malicious attacks. 

Customers feel cheated when they encounter error pages and redirects. They increase a site’s bounce rate, which affects sales. These errors have a negative effect on your business and should be rectified with Google Analytics.

Call to Action and Contacts

Even with superior products, visitors rarely convert to paying customers, unless you ask them. The Call to Action indicates that you’re able to do what the content promises. In addition to showing capability, this is why a serious business should never lack a call-to-action.

70% of businesses lack call-to-action on their homepages. The primary goal of any business is to increase sales revenue. You may never convert clients if your site doesn’t prompt them to take any action. Use a catchy call to action to achieve the primary goal of your business.

Features of An Effective Call to Action

  1. It should be visible
  2. Should be clear and concise
  3. Should evoke a sense of urgency
  4. Action-oriented
  5. Should be colorful
  6. Should use the first-person tone
  7. Easy to find
  8. Should be compelling

That said, designing a site to include all these features may overwhelm most business owners. A quick and stress-free way of getting a good WordPress web design is to hire a professional to do it for you. There are those who, for example, there are website builders for nonprofits. They are different from a typical e-commerce platform. Nonprofits are about collecting donations and disbursing them to deserving causes. E-commerce, on the other hand, is about the bottom line which comes from conversions.

What is a Conversion Rate

Conversion may be described as a measure of turning potential clients into customers. It is calculated as follows:

The formula for conversion rate.

Step 1: Clients visiting the site less Clients exiting the site
Step 2: Divide the result of step 1 above and multiply it by 100%

Note: the final answer is called the conversion rate.

Business and financial analysts use the conversion rate to evaluate your overall performance.

Why Web Design May Be Behind Your Conversion Decline

Your website acts as a salesperson – it has to be at its best to guarantee you high conversions. As stated above, poor web designs make the site less effective. A poor web design could be ailing your website if there’s a sharp decline in conversions. 

From these research statistics, we can see why a business should pay attention to the conversion rate. One reason why this happens is that internet users don’t spend much time on an unappealing website.

Despite having a well-performing website, it has to attract prospective customers. Users shouldn’t have a difficult time finding the products or services on offer. For instance, using high-quality images makes the website eye-catching and keeps users browsing for an extended period.

Web design is very dynamic, and website owners always need to keep that in mind. Your conversions will quickly decline if you do not keep up with the latest industry trends. It would help if you were keen to adopt trends such as dark mode to improve text readability.

You can also employ virtual assistants and use chatbots as a way of keeping up with new trends. The list can go on to virtual reality and the use of 3D elements. You can never exhaust web design trends in a paragraph or two; thus, this list isn’t conclusive. Be keen enough to know what’s new in the industry and update your strategies.

Moreover, the following points show why your WordPress web design may be behind conversion decline.

  • Damage to Professional Outlook — In this digital era, promoting your business on a poorly designed website makes you appear uninformed and out of touch with reality. Research on customer behavior indicates that clients are likely to exit a site if they evaluate the level of your site’s reliability and find it wanting.
  • Denies You a Chance to SellEach time clients exit your site due to a shortfall in the web design or user experience, your chances of making a sale diminish.
  • Denies You More Profit Margins — As we’ve stated above, an increase in the bounce rate denies your business a chance to make a sale and more profit at the end of the trading period.
  • Denies You Recommendations and Potential Customers — With a good web design, site visitors may end up becoming customers. Moreover, if customer satisfaction is met, they may recommend your business to their associates. On the other hand, inferior designs work against this.
  • Damages Business Credibility — Potential customers buying decisions are influenced by what they see. A poorly designed and cluttered site creates a negative impression on potential clients, which in turn damages your credibility.

How Web Design May be Used to Fix Conversion Decline

  1. Invest in Effective Content

As we saw earlier, content is king and can’t be ignored by any business person with an intention to improve conversion rate. Failure to do so, you stand losing 38% of your clients. Effective content is tied to the use of recommended article length, blog updates frequency, content readability, and many more factors.

Let the content be about the customer and not you. Improve your storytelling tactics, which can boost your brand by:

  • Making clients the heroes
  • Be honest
  • Use practice examples that they can relate to
  • Try to be humorous but still professional

Updating your blog with evergreen content is a sure way to stand out from the competition. Studies on customer behavior show that regularly updating a site with fresh content may generate leads to the business. Aim to deliver the right content.  Powerful content may work on the potential clients’ emotions, while the right content helps them to make buying decisions.

  1. Improve User Experience

Avoid disruptive pop-ups, redirects, and errors, as they affect user experience. Evaluate your site’s response from time to time. If the mishaps mentioned above are detected, fix them to retain existing and potential clients.

If your web pages take a long time to load and provide the required information, the bounce rate may increase. Customers like fast, responsive, and highly interactive sites.

As we discussed earlier, the customer’s buying decision is highly determined by the ability to navigate your site easily. The interface should be well designed and laid out for a good user experience. Ensure your site is designed to cater to the needs of people with sight and hearing issues.

  1. Enhance readability

According to web design guidelines, the conversion rate may be increased by placing critical elements of a page at the points of focus.

Three-thirds are made by dividing a page, both horizontally and vertically, with four lines to get four intersection points. When an object is placed on any of the four points, there is increased focus towards them.

Despite the impression the words create, negative space is suitable for web design, without which your site may be of no use. It refers to the white spaces between objects. Keen attention to the negative spaces may improve readability hence user experience.

Rules for Negative Spaces

  1. The size of the font determines the size of the negative spaces
  2. Line height, below and above, should be 1.5 times larger than the font
  3. Use small sentences and paragraphs
  4. Put negative spaces between large elements, including header, footer, body, and sidebar.

Research shows that the average person browses a web page in an f pattern. Most people start navigating from the left side to the right side of the screen. They then move down and finally get to the bottom of the page, which receives the least attention.

Different colors may evoke a variety of emotions in different people. Colors may be used to convey information and boost user experience. Select colors that are likely to convey the intended information. Use the contrast function to make headlines, body, and call to action readable.

It has been discovered that sites targeting a multilingual client base are more successful. It also comes with the advantages of a global outlook. Potential customers are likely to trust businesses having a global outlook that the ones that do not. Pay attention to the common international languages to increase the chances of conversion.

On top of the above tips, you can also research other handy tips and tricks that can drive traffic to your site, earn you more visibility, and boost conversions. Search engines are constantly evolving and you need to arm yourself with the right information to remain competitive.

Conclusion

From the above-detailed discussion, business owners cannot overlook the benefits of having a professionally designed website. Moreover, we’ve conclusively proved that web design may be the reason behind your conversion decline. WordPress sites produce the most significant results when it comes to user experience and usability. At first glance, investing in a professional WordPress website design may appear costly. However, the benefits you stand to get are worth the extra effort.

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Written By

Dan has hands-on experience in digital marketing since 2007. He has been building teams and coaching others to foster innovation and solve real-time problems. Dan also enjoys photography and traveling. Follow him on LinkedIn.

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