When planning out your website design, you can’t just go in blind and choose to create a design for the sake of having a website. While it’s important to have a website for your business in this day and age, you can’t have a site developed and designed just for the sake of having a website. You need to outline what your goals for having a website are.
Is it to get more clients? It is to get more sales? As an eCommerce site, is it to sell more items? It’s very important that you outline what these goals are ahead of time before anything else. This is because these goals are what help your designers visualize what needs to be done in order to achieve these goals, which makes it easier for them to determine what direction to take when creating your design.
All of your goals for your website, whether it’s to have more users, more newsletter subscribers, more sales, or more online revenue, these are what we call conversions.
Conversions are when users who access your site perform the action that you intended your website for. If you have more conversions from your site, then it’s safe to say that your website is successful in converting users. But there may be times when mistakes are made in conversions, and these have to be corrected as soon as possible in order to avoid any loss in revenue or traffic.
One of the biggest conversion mistakes you can make as a website owner is not optimizing your site’s load time. Users expect almost instant results when they access materials on the Internet, and your website design should be no different.
Surveys have shown that users are more likely to opt out of a website with a slow load time, increasing that website’s bounce rate. Make sure you cut out any videos or large-sized images that may be slowing down your site’s load time.
The next biggest mistake you can make that may be costing your conversions is not designing your website for mobile. More than half of online users browse the Internet almost exclusively on their mobile devices. If your website is not optimized for mobile, then you are missing out on a large percentage of the online demographic.
It is highly recommended that when creating your website design from the beginning, you should design it with mobile users already in mind. This helps cut down on any time to make changes later on in the future to accommodate the mobile platform.
Some other additional mistakes that could be costing your conversions also include having an overly complicated website design that may hurt your users’ experience, as well as having too much irrelevant information displayed on your website.