Increasing Website Conversions Using Design Principles

There is a reason why some things are considered to be principles. They are so important that using or not using them will break the situation. The same thing applies to the success of websites and their using or not using design principles.

According to studies, over 40% of netizens prefer using a website that is beautifully designed. But do you know that a well-designed yet poorly optimized website will get you nowhere. Much like anything in general, you need to strike a balance between aesthetics and utility while designing a website.

With the help of the combination of good aesthetical intuition and website usability, you can skyrocket your website’s conversion rate. This article will help you understand how you can use basic design principles to increase your website’s conversion rates.

Importance of Using Design Principles to Increase Website Conversations

If you are reading this article, the chances are that you already own a website. However, you are not getting enough conversions through this website and want to do something about that. There could be two main reasons why your website is not able to convert sales.

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·         The website’s interface and design are not user-friendly. Therefore, customers open your website and close it immediately because the design is not visually satisfying. Most netizens do not want to engage with such websites.

·         Your website has a beautiful design, but the template is not optimized for sales. Therefore, customers visit your site, stay on it for a while, but leave without conversions because their minds are not focused on the product but the design.

Both of these problems mentioned above can be fixed by building your website according to design principles. These principles will allow you to integrate usability with intuition to form a design that sells. Principles will enable you to make a beautifully designed website that directs the viewers to the call-to-action. Therefore, they help you increase your website’s conversion rate.

Design Principles That Will Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rates

Now that you know the importance of applying design principles let us look into some of them. All these principles help divert the customer’s focus on the call-to-action button. Therefore, they help increase any website’s conversion rates.

Put Your Call-to-Action in a Box

What is the essential element of the page when you are focusing on increasing conversions?  It is the call-to-action button. Therefore, you need to highlight this specific button to attract the customer’s attention. Distinguishing the most crucial element of the page is vital, and that can be done by putting it in a container.

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When you put a call-to-action button within a container, you stop presenting as just another element of the page. The blandness or non-boldness of the content, along with the headings and subheadings, all play only one role when the design is concerned. They divert the customer’s attention to the call-to-action button.

Use Contrast Psychology and Color Theory

Most people believe that bright colors such as red and orange increase the conversion rate of the website. However, they are far from the truth. In reality, almost any color available on the color wheel can convert well. The only thing that matters is how well the color stands out against the background.

Imagine that your entire page’s background is orange, and you put a red call-to-action button over it. It will never work. However, colors such as purple and royal blue will stand out and ensure better conversions.

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While deciding the color of your call-to-action button and the website as a whole, you must consider the website’s mood. The color used on the major chunk and most important elements of the website plays a vital role in conveying specific moods to the customer. If you are selling books, a soothing fawn color will work better than a bright red color.

Add Visual Cues to Enhance the Desired Destiny

Visual or directional cues work extremely strongly on potential customers. Subtle things like the surrounding picture’s line direction and arrows direct the customer’s attention towards the conversion goal.

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If you plan to use some photographs or art on your website, make sure that they too point towards the destiny button. This is a crucial element that defines the way the customer’s attention falls exactly where you want them to land.

Create Funnels

One of the most effective ways to increase website conversions is by designing your website in a funnel format. Funnels are the best way to divert the user to exactly where you want them to land. Therefore, from the second the user enters your website, they enter into your carefully woven path that will lead them directly to the call-to-action button.

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A great thing about funnels is that even knowledgeable customers do not realize the way they were manipulated their way through the website and to the call-to-action button. Funnels are one of the best ways of focusing on the conversion area of the website.

Funnels are also great for helping you gather the information you might need to retain customers. It also helps the customer go through a tour of your website, providing them all the necessary information they might need. All these things are done as you control the reader’s movement direction.

Create Visual Hierarchy

Much like funnels, creating a visual hierarchy in your website allows you to control the customer’s attention direction. Undoubtedly, the design of each element plays a vital role. However, the layout in which all these elements are set up plays an even more important role in increasing conversions. Studies show that great hierarchy can increase a website’s sales by over 35%.

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A good visual hierarchy communicates a lot to the customer. It helps you provide the information that the customer needs in the order that you want them to see it. With the help of proper layout, you can put or remove emphasis from certain elements, which further increases the control you have over the customer’s attention.

Utilize the F-Layout

Since we’re already talking about layout, let us consider the F-layout. According to studies, the natural course that people’s eyes follow on the screen is an ‘F’ pattern. People’s eyes tend to wander from left to right and from top to bottom. Therefore, the first look that they give is on the upper-left side of the page.

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You can utilize this formula to understand the right layout for your website. You can strategically place the action buttons at places with the most visibility according to the F-layout. You can push the less important thing to the less visible areas.

By using the F-layout, you will grab the most conversions possible. The best thing about this is that the customers will never know that their minds have been tricked into focusing on the things you want them to focus on.

Make Efficient Use of the Whitespace

Whitespace utilization is an essential skill to learn while creating a website design. The whitespace distance and quantity impact the action that the customers will ultimately decide to take.

The very first thing that you should note is that whitespace is the best place on a website to place the action button. When the action button is in whitespace, customers do not have to look too hard for it. Therefore, it is more likely that they will use the button.

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Another thing to remember is the spacing utilization in whitespace. It would be best if you nailed the correct distance between the content and the action area. While it is absolutely okay to have extra whitespace after the action button, you must ensure that you utilize the area before it judiciously.

If the action area is too close to the content area, customers might find it difficult to differentiate it from the other elements. However, if there is too much space between the content and the action area, people might perceive them to be two different things. Therefore, dissociating the information with the action.

Follow Hick’s Law

Hick’s law is named after William Edmund Hick, a British psychologist. The law states that the more choices the customers have, the longer the decision time will become. This is an important thing to understand while increasing website conversions considering netizen’s short attention-spans. Therefore, you can do two things to increase conversion on your website.

The first thing you can do is limit the number of decisions that a customer has to make on your website. If you are selling a few products, make sure that a single page is talking about a single product. Also, when creating a list of categories for an online shopping website, make sure that you categorize all items into as few categories as possible.

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The second thing to note is that the page that has the main action only has one decision choice to make. Therefore, using a full-page CTA is not a bad idea as long as it is designed beautifully. Determine the actions that are the most important for each page and highlight only that, rivaling it with no other choice other than to accept or decline your offer.

Make Use of the Rule of Thirds

If you have photography experience, you must have heard of the Rule of thirds. According to this design principle, you’re supposed to design the entire page into nine parts by drawing three horizontal and three vertical sections. The principle states that the most attention that the customers will focus is on the part that is in the middle of the page.

It would be best if you placed the action area at this place because this is where all the attention will be diverted. Placing the actions buttons right in the middle of the page, however, will make the layout ugly. Therefore, placing the button on one of the intersecting lines is a great idea.

Remember That Your Audience is Impatient

While most designers concentrate on how their design looks, they forget to test the speed at which the design loads. This is, however, one of the most important factors to note. You must remember that most people on the internet do not have much patience. If your website takes more than 7 seconds to load, you will lose most of your audience, which will reduce conversions.

(Source : https://www.pingdom.com/#)

The decreasing patience of the customers is the biggest reason why minimalistic website designs are in all rage these days. Make sure that your design is light enough to get loaded in as little time as possible. Using free tools such as Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights will help you get an idea of how quickly your website can load.

Remember the 8-Second Rule

As we have already established, people on the internet do not have a lot of patience. However, it is worth noting that they do not have a great attention span either. The average attention span of a human is about 8 seconds.

You get only eight seconds to grab the type of attention from the customer that will make them want to stay on your website. The more the number of customers who stay on your page, the more sales you will be able to make. Given below are some ways in which you can grab the customer’s attention quickly.

• Use a catchy heading that is hard to resist.
• Write a benefit-oriented brief that makes the customers want to know more about the product or service. Make the customers believe that your product or service has a lot to offer.
• Use power words to better the sound of your entire content.
• Use the hover effect on the image that portrays the items to be sold. This will make the images very interesting, and the customers will want to stay.
• Use animations to entice the customer’s mind.

Wrapping Up

Some design principles are so straightforward that it is almost laughable to see how fewer people utilize them. With the help of a well-optimized and beautifully-set design, increasing a website’s conversion rate is not difficult. Design helps you put the focus on the elements that require focusing on, and this is how they help increase conversions from a website.