7 user experience hacks that will increase your conversion rates!

A great product or service offering, message and design, together with, pre-qualified traffic, are fundamental to great conversion rates. However, you may not have thought about the more subtle aspects of your webpage experience and how these elements can significantly affect conversion rate performance.

Here is a short list of ideas for hacking your web landing pages conversion rates without changing design, messaging or your offering.

1. Be smart with your forms

The lead capture form is one of the crucial areas that can have either a positive or negative effect on conversion. Forms are often an after-thought of a web page design, where functionality is often completely overlooked. Consider reducing the number of fields you are using by either deleting or filling hidden fields via URL parameters. Update your captcha to the latest tech or remove it entirely and definitely carefully consider the text on your submit button.

2. Reduce page load time

People hate waiting for a page to finish loading before they get to view it. Check your using Google Pagespeed Insights tool and see how they can be improved. Load the most important ‘above the fold’ elements in a landing page first to avoid your web visitor having to wait several seconds before they can view or interact with information.

Find Google pagespeed insights here.

3. Add directional cues

People’s eyes naturally follow directional cues, this can be an easy addition to a landing page, add an arrow or caveat that direct the user to the key actions you desire them to undertake.

Consider directing users to the first field of a form or key call to actions within the page to provide a clear desired action for them to undertake.

See this great article on visual focus techniques.

4. Don’t assume users know what you want them to do

Standard website usability should be maintained on any page. Interactive elements should respond appropriately, buttons functionality should be confirmed with a clear hover effect, fields should highlight to show users what field they are filling in. Google recently released its ‘Google Material Design’ guidelines, which is basically Googles own design spec; like it or not it can provide great insight into natural and intuitive user experience design.

Find Google material design lite theme here.

5. Make your content readable

Do not use tiny font or use a font colour that blends into the background. Separate your content and split lengthy paragraphs. Use numbered lists and bullet points to separate key information within paragraphs. Make sure you are highlighting call to actions and headings so they can be easily scanned within the pages content.

6. Use easily recognisable icons

These days most kids have no idea that the save icon is actually an old 3.5’ floppy disk but they all know exactly what it does. In your page design use easily recognisable icons to indicate functionality or actions which you want the user to undertake.

7. Mobile functionality

Apart from ensuring your site look and works great on mobile devices ensure that the phone numbers can be tapped on to make a phone call, this simple addition is surprisingly missing from many pages. The other key mistake make on mobile devices is the form validation/ error messages, often these remain in the desktop format and when users miss or make an error on the form then render the form unusable again.

Additional resources

This article was to highlight some key UX elements that can be reviewed to increase your conversion rates but doesn’t cover the design, image and layout optimisations, this is already very well documented online so please feel free to see these additional resources below

• Landing page best practises by Unbounce
• How to make a landing page that converts by Kissmetrics
• How to make great landing pages by Wordstream

Can we help?

Having troubles getting your webpages to convert? Please let us know and we’d be happy to see how we can assist.