5 top tips for website layout for increased conversions

5 top tips for website layout for increased conversions

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Transcribed from video:

Charlie Hutton: Hi, everybody. It’s Charlie here again from Hutchinson Web Design and what we’re going to have a look at today is how to boost your conversions on your website when it actually comes to the layout itself of the webpage.

There are a lot of factors here that can have quite a big difference on actually getting your customers or visitors to take action on your website when you want them to. We’re going to have a look at probably our top five areas that we think you need to focus and look at. Let’s get cracking and let’s get started.

The first one I think really is it’s a matter of making sure that you keep your website nice and simple. The cleaner and easier it is to view everything – so your logo up here. Don’t forget your telephone number at the top. This is where we always start looking, the top right of the page. Some sort of navigation.

There’s always a tendency to try to ram as much content in as possible especially if you’re looking at three columns and people have loads of stuff over here as well. You have your big, shiny picture and basically everything gets very, very busy on your page. What it can actually do, it can actually take you off topic for what you’re really focusing on and what you really want to talk about.

Really think about when you’re trying to get people to take action on specific pages, try and keep your content in your pages very precise, very clean so that you’re not confusing the reader and not bombarding them with 101 different things to look at and think about. We all know that we want all the importance and want to try and tell everyone everything that we do but it’s almost better to split those up over separate pages so that each page is specific and about a core focus. In that way, as I said, you’re not going to bore or tempt your readers to read about something that A, they’re not personally interested in and B, that’s off-topic.

The next thing that we always say is important to look at is white space, lots of this, especially if you got big call-to-action buttons like “sign up now”. It’s always good to make sure you have a lot of white space around your buttons and your big call-to-actions, possibly an arrow pointing in as well. Basically by having all these white space around your buttons, you’re drawing the visitor’s eye all the time to this sort of area on the webpage.

Say we got a layout here perhaps which has got a button up here and then we’ve got text all the way around it, text up here as well, more text on the side bar. Basically your button is going to get lost. Your button which is here is going to get lost in all of this other text and all this other copy. Obviously the whole point of this page, if you got a “sign up” button or a “download” button, is to get customers to click it or get visitors to click it.

When you have buttons and call-to-actions, try and always make sure that you leave a load of white space around and always draw their eye and to also make sure it’s nice and visible to any visitors who are actually on your website.

Now the next one is navigation and this is specifically again to pages where you want call-to-actions to take place. I know it’s very tempting. You always want to link and it’s good to have a good link structure on your website for SEO purposes but on your call-to-action pages, always try and limit your navigation to a certain extent.

If you got some sort of “sign up” button, if you got a navigation here, maybe you’ve got one in your footer as well and perhaps you’ve got one in your sidebar coming down here, what you’re doing is you’re enticing and encouraging people not to click this button here but to instead perhaps go to your navigation or click your side links or click your footer links. Basically, you’re sending people away from your main call-to-action.

It’s often good to have a separate layout design for perhaps your pages where you’ve got a sign up form so that you’ve got – so your sign up button here for this part to the side. You might just have your navigation bar at the top or might just have something at the footer, perhaps at the bottom, especially with pay per click campaigns, making sure again that you’re trying to keep people on this page. Make sure that they’re focused on your “go” button or your “sign up” button because otherwise, you will run the temptation of losing people throughout your site

The next one is link-based. There’s often a lot of temptation. Sometimes you’re limited to using PLR content or whatever it might be but if you got a lot of text on your page or if you’re linking to resources and articles, you’re using you’ll link to a lot of external websites.

It’s good to link to external websites. It can enforce your credibility in bits and pieces as well throughout the site but you really don’t want to do it on a page where you’ve got some sort of a call-to-action button. Again, you run the temptation of people A, not only leaving you in your course of like a sales page or page where you want people to actually do something but you’re actually getting them to leave your website and potentially never come back because they’re going to go on to this other website or they might find something very useful.

They might then get stuck into their navigation on that website. Five, ten minutes later, they’ve completely forgotten about you. They definitely haven’t clicked your sales button here or your “go” button and as I’ve said, you’ve potentially lost that prospect for a while now unless they can re-find your website and come back to it. It’s not only watching internal links but what you’re linking to external websites as well especially on your call pages with which you’re trying to get a call-to-action on there.

Now what we also try is related to pages, perhaps pages where you’ve got sign up forms or actually sales buttons or whatever it might be. Try and keep it within the one page. You see this a lot now with checkout forms and checkout processes where you might have a one, two and a three-step process basically just making sure that everything is nice and fluid for your visitor. We also like to keep it almost within one simple page. They click between the steps or whatever it might be that you need to complete. It’s very fluid and you’re not actually forcing them to refresh or reload the page.

This can perhaps be done with some JavaScript or whatever it might be but each time you sound like forcing or getting the customer to go through to a next step or a step two and even a step three, you know, next page as well, again you’re risking the chances that that customer A, either at a checkout process, might leave your process altogether or if it’s actually some sort of sign up process or whatever it might be, you might start losing people at stage two. You might start losing people at stage three. Whereas at stage one, they were fully bought in and they were sold on what you were offering so like two or three pages later they might not be. It’s just trying to make sure that you keep everything nice and simple. Try and keep it all on one page and basically what that will do is well, it makes sure that you keep your reader’s attention.

Now this also applies if you’ve got something like normal articles and whatever it might be as well. If you’ve got a lot of key information rather than having something like “see more on page two”, it’s always good. Don’t be scared of using the homepages. Homepages work well. If your content is good, people will scroll up and down. Try and keep it within one page. It keeps it nice and clear, keeps it precise and it also keeps the reader’s attention and you’re not forcing them to click through and navigate on to multiple pages where as we said, you potentially quite lose them

That’s everything from there. That’s our top five tips as far as website layout is concerned when it comes to conversions. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you all soon.