8 tips to boost your website's conversion rate

Your website's conversion rate is a key metric for measuring the performance and relevance of your communication efforts. On your site, it represents the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action (the conversion) out of the total number of visitors. For example, if only 2 out of 100 visitors make a purchase, your conversion rate is 2%. How can you best optimize and increase your website's conversion rate? We explain everything!

1- Improve UX to boost conversion rates

First piece of advice: if your conversion rate is low, you need to optimize your site’s UX. If visitors aren’t making purchases, it might be because the user journey isn’t encouraging them to do so.

Have you ever tested your site by putting yourself in your users' shoes?

Your website must be clear, intuitive, and free of any navigation obstacles. Run tests, gather feedback, and analyze page data to identify your site’s weak points.

Putting yourself in the users’ place has a methodical version, and it costs half a day. The Nielsen Norman Group points out that five users are enough to reveal most of an interface’s usability problems, and that “zero users gives zero insights”. The protocol fits in three rules: give a real task (“buy this product”), explain nothing, and note every hesitation. The obstacles that come out of five sessions are almost always different from those a team imagines in a meeting.

By highlighting links, adding clearly visible buttons, adjusting menu and navigation elements, and following key best practices, you can significantly enhance the user experience, streamline the journey, and boost your conversion rate.

One detail blocks more conversions than people think, and it can be measured: contrast. The WCAG require a ratio of at least 4.5:1 between text and its background, and 3:1 for interface elements such as a button’s border. A light-grey button on white, help text at 60% grey or a too-pale field label become unreadable in sunlight, on a poor screen, or for a sizeable share of visitors. It is the cheapest optimisation on this list, and one of the most effective.

2- Reduce loading times

Your website must load quickly! The figure often quoted, “half of visitors leave beyond three seconds”, comes from benchmarks circulating since the 2010s and is best treated as an order of magnitude. Since then, “fast” has had a public, measurable definition, set out below.

Three metrics now replace that percentage, and they have the advantage of being enforceable. Google assesses the Core Web Vitals at the 75th percentile of real visits, separately on mobile and desktop: Largest Contentful Paint, how long the largest visible element takes to render, must stay under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and cumulative layout shift below 0.1. The last one is the most underestimated on a conversion funnel: an image without dimensions or a banner injected late shifts the button at the exact moment the visitor clicks.

To measure your website's loading speed, you can use tools like Gtmetrix which will also provide you with actionable recommendations. At Scroll, we develop websiteswith optimal loading speeds from day one.

To reduce loading speed, there are several techniques:

- Limit JavaScript resources, which can be heavy to load.

- Compress images to reduce their file size.

- Opt for web-optimized image formats (JPEG, webp).

- Set up a caching system.

- Optimize your code by bundling files.

- Choose a high-performance hosting provider.

At Scroll, we chose to use Webflow which allows us to develop professional and ultra-fast websites with optimal loading times that do not negatively impact conversion rates.

3- Have a responsive website

One of the most important points for any website owner today is to have a 100% responsive site. Switching devices should not negatively impact the user journey on your site.

Whether the user is on desktop, tablet, or mobile, navigation must be perfectly adapted. Neglecting one format could cause you to miss out on many conversions. It’s therefore important to track and analyze your traffic by device to ensure no element is blocking.

In 2021, mobile traffic accounted for 71% of global web traffic. By making your site responsive and 100% optimized for mobile, you can significantly increase your conversion rate.

4- Offer an optimal payment funnel

If you want to increase your conversion rate, the final payment step must be as optimized as possible.

Offer your visitors multiple payment options, guarantee 100% secure transactions, and don’t make the process complicated. Every small obstacle at this stage could deter the visitor from making a purchase.

To ensure an optimized payment funnel, offer well-known, trustworthy payment methods, avoid asking for too much optional information, and refine the design of your checkout pages. These elements greatly reassure your visitors!

5- Provide enough information

Give visitors enough information so they don’t need to look elsewhere!

You must absolutely provide enough precise information about your product or service so that visitors don’t need to seek details on another site. If they leave your site to research, they might discover a similar product or service and end up buying from a competitor.

Study and analyze user questions to address them in your content and keep visitors on your site.

6- Boost conversion rates with customer reviews

Highlighting customer reviews can help reassure visitors. In e-commerce, nearly 9 out of 10 customers check reviews before making a purchase.

By featuring positive reviews of your flagship products on your homepage and prominently displaying customer feedback on product pages, you increase your chances of conversions.

In some cases, you can also collect video testimonials from clients to showcase on your site.

As you can see, by reassuring visitors as much as possible with positive comments and ratings on your products, you improve your chances of increasing your conversion rate.

7- Offer promotional codes

Any element that encourages purchases is worth using to boost your conversion rate, and promotional codes are no exception!

By creating and prominently displaying time-limited promotional codes on your site, you create a sense of urgency that pushes visitors to make a purchase. You can add promo codes on the homepage, product pages, or just before checkout to prevent cart abandonment, it’s up to you, depending on your strategy, product, and target audience!

If you're going to reduce your profits with promo codes, by increasing your conversion rate, you'll be able to sell in larger quantities, it's up to you to find the perfect balance!

8- Run tests to identify the elements that impact conversion rates

Finally, run tests! Test formats, navigation, designs, buttons, etc., based on your target audience. By testing and precisely analyzing the results, you'll know where and how to act on your site to boost your conversion rate.

Boost your conversion rate with Scroll agency

Do you want to redesign your site to improve your conversion rate? Or start from scratch with an optimized website? At Scroll, we develop professional, sleek, and high-performing sites using CMS Webflow. Our Webflow agency team of experts is here to work with you on tailored solutions that perfectly meet your needs. If you have a project, don’t hesitate to reach out!