How To Increase Website Sales 2023
Helpful tips on how to increase sales through web design in 2023.
Table of Contents
1. Responsive Design
If your goal is to create web design for sales, a main component of your website should be responsive design. Responsive design will allow your website to be displayed perfectly on all devices; PC, tablet, mobile phone, etc.
Nowadays, the majority of users access a website via a smartphone. With responsive design your website will detect the screen size a user is accessing the website from, and change its style to fit that device. As a website owner it is your responsibility to make everything as easy and accessible as possible for your customers, so that they only have to worry about viewing the product and hopefully buying it.
Data suggests that 40% of consumers will instead turn to a competitors website if the one they currently are in doesn't perform well. That huge number could be causing a significant impact on your sales.
Looking to test the responsiveness of your website? Just access it from your mobile phone, or tablet, PC; and see how it looks on those devices. Alternatively, press F12 on a page and click on the phone symbol on the top left of the menu to view the page in different dimensions. Always make sure your website can reach as many people as possible.
2. Call to Action (CTA)
One of the best ways to increase sales with web design, is to implement Call to Actions (CTA) on your website. CTAs are actions that users take on your website in order to complete an objective. What that objective represents will be different for each website owner, however the most common CTAs lead to a type of purchase, sign-up, or conversion.
Once a user has read the information on the page and is ready to take the next step, a call to action will help them navigate the website to making that purchase with ease. Remember, you want to keep the process as simple as possible for the user and not send them to other pages that might distract them from converting.
Make sure to strategically CTAs at prime spots in your website, so that you may incentivize that user to take action while you hold their interest. Some good spots are the navbar menu at the top, or a button on the page that calls for the user's attention, without trying to be too aggressive. Always provide a good balance of value and promotion.
Here you can see we chose to place call to actions in an area that is easy for users to see. The menu at the top is easily accessible each time a user scrolls on the page, and we also placed a "Contact Us" button at the center.
3. Testimonials
The most powerful method of advertising, to this day, is word of mouth. This means testimonials and preferably from someone you trust that can vouch for that product. This helps demonstrate to the customer that you are a legitimate business, and a reputable source in the industry.
Over 85% of consumers trust testimonials, and out of those 90% will only trust sources that have at least a 4 star review or higher. Interestingly enough, only around 10% of consumers trust a 5 star review. Most people tend to think the product is too good to be true. Therefore, the sweet spot to be is actually a mix of 4.5 to 5 star reviews.
Once you start closing a few deals, you will start gaining reviews for your business. Make sure to contact the person for permission first, and once you do, collect those reviews and create a small section in your website to showcase them. This will help give a boost of confidence to the new users who are unsure about working with you.
If you want to take it a step further, you can also display the services you've done for those businesses on your website. This way you are helping your client with a backlink that generates traffic, and further ensuring them of proof of your great work!
4. Discounts, Promotions, Packages
Offering discounts is a great way to boost sales as it helps those who are on the fence about buying your products. This is also a good opportunity to create a sense of urgency for the customer, therefore something like a discount with an expiration date can work well in this scenario. You are informing the customer that if they make a purchase now, they can get a big deal that they might not be able to get later. And in business it is always best to close a deal now rather than later.
If you didn’t know, data suggests that discounts in the 10% - 20% range have an increased sales success rate of 28% per unit. Those are some big numbers that you can leverage and help boost your sales!
If you combine this with promotions and packages, you can try upselling your client on a better deal for them. Say if a customer wanted to buy logo design services from you, and you take this opportunity to mention to them that there’s a promotion and they can get a logo and full web design support for a “Premium Package”.
If the customer is interested, you just managed to upsell and score an even bigger deal!
5. Page Speed
Another component that greatly affects the efficiency of a website is page speed. If your website isn't optimized properly, you can hurt your business by missing out on big sales for your business. 40% of users will wait no longer than 3 seconds for a webpage to load before they decide to leave the website.
Run a speed test of your website: Speed Test
But there are a number of things that you can do to help increase your site load time, and increase sales for your company. Let's take a look at 5 ways to increase page speed.
Hosting
Your hosting provider plays an important part in your website performance. Having a good host will result in better page load speed, and a better experience for your visitors. Think of it like a crowded subway, where you have too few trains to take too many people different places. Each train can only accommodate so many people, and therefore you will need to increase your capacity in order to serve more people at once. Worst case scenario, your server may crash and so does your website, which could be a big loss for your company. If you are unsure, it is good practice to consult with an expert to help you decide which hosting plan would best suit your business. They can help you save a couple of hundred bucks annually on different hosting plans.
Compress and optimize your images
Although images are a great way to ease the boringness of text on your website, as well as being a powerful visual eye-catcher for your visitors; large image files can slow down your website and specially if you have multiple high-quality images being rendered on a single page. A good way to avoid this mistake is to compress your images so that they might retain good quality without damaging performance. We linked one such tool in this paragraph, but you can find many helpful image compressors online simply by googling "image compressor" or similar parameters.
Make sure to test these images on your website first before making any substantial changes. Take a look at the file size and see if it is smaller than it was previously, but without damaging the quality.
Minify HTML, JavaScript, CSS
Together with compressing images, another effective method to achieve the same result on the rest of your website is to minify the HTML, JS, CSS code in your files. What I mean by this is, removing the unnecessary characters, spaces, comments, etc; from your code. Now don't go in there and just start messing with code without having any idea what you're doing, that can certainly end up in disaster pretty fast.
One of the ways this minify technique can be achieved is via the WP Rocket plugin, for WordPress users. Although there are many similar plugins, if you are using a CMS I suggest browsing through your plugin repository and finding one that best suits you. Or if you are using a fully custom website, you might need to do some extra research to find one that fits whatever library you are using. It is a common method so it shouldn't be very hard to achieve.
Plugins
I thought this would be a good topic to include since I previously suggested using a plugin to help manage your website. Although yes, plugins can be helpful, having a lot of plugins however can also impact your website negatively. Why? Because plugins can create unnecessary bloat on your website. Most people who aren't that tech savvy also don't keep their plugins updated, and that can eventually create a security risk or crash a web page.
For those reasons, try to keep your number of plugins on the low end. A monthly checkup on the list of plugins in your website would be a good practice in order to keep them up to date, and review if you really need it. Make sure to test your pages before and after the change to ensure nothing else is broken with the removal of the plugin.
Caching
Caching is one of the best techniques web developers use in order to optimize a website for speed. Essentially, caching stores a copy of the files that your website uses in order to render a particular page. This way, when the next user goes to access your page, the server already has a version saved that they can readily display to that user. It's a great way to handle growing websites that attract lots of visitors and is a proven way to increase sales through web design. If you are interested, here's another article we recommend on caching in order to help you understand some advanced concepts.
6. A/B Testing
If you've followed one or all of the tips above, the last thing to do is to test your changes and make sure they were helpful. Running an A/B test of all pages impacted by the changes will help you determine the efficiency of the changes. The goal here is to create 2 versions of a page, version A and version B. Serve those pages randomly to each visitor of the website, and keep track of how each performs.
Suggestions of things to test:
- Change the headlines at the top of your traffic-heavy pages. Use different titles for page A/B, see which one performs better.
- Move Call to Actions (CTA) around, see which buttons are getting the most clicks and try to place a text and/or a button there that leads to a conversion.
- Got a form on your page? Try condensing it by utilizing fewer fields, if possible, and speed up the process. Or do the opposite if you think there is a lack of information in your system that you would benefit knowing ahead of time.
In our London page we decided to move our "About" section to the top in order to see how it behaves for users. Depending on the page we may run different campaigns and keep track of the data with Google Analytics, a great way to track how users interact with your website which helps when making design decisions.
Web Design is a great way to drive sales to your website. Search Engines will rank higher websites that have good design, and good relevant content. There are many tools online that can help you optimize your page, here are 2 more you can add to your arsenal of page optimization techniques.
Use Google's Core Web Vitals to perform a scan of your website: Core Web Vitals
Track information on your website: Google Analytics
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