Do you know that a one-second delay in your website speed can cost you 7 percent in conversions? Or that 99 percecnt of people who visit your website won’t buy on their first visit?
It’s easy to obsess over minor things like font size or button color, but there are more factors that influence website conversions behind the scenes. If you’d like to significantly improve conversions on your website this article shares 5 research-backed tips guaranteed to help you boost your website conversions:
1. Improve Your Website Speed
Research by Akamai found that a one-second delay in site speed will cost you 7 percent in website conversions; for perspective, a one-second delay in site loading time will cost Amazon $1.6 billion annually.
Improving your site loading time can lead to a significant increase in revenue for your website, depending on what scale you’re operating at; Radware reported that a two-second improvement in page load times more than doubled conversions for one of their clients.
Here are some tips to help you improve your website speed:
- Get Quality Hosting: There are so many factors that influence how fast your website will be, and they include server type, server configuration, and server optimization. A good web host will have this all handled, significantly lessening your worries.
- Install a Good CMS: There’s a reason why WordPress is so widely accepted today. It’s gone through a lot of revisions and optimizations, and the result is a super fast and lightweight CMS. WordPress can be used for pretty much anything you want to build on your site; if you can’t go with WordPress, make sure your CMS is robust and fast.
- Enable Caching on Your Website
- Use a CDN to Power Your Website: A CDN hosts a version of your site on different servers across the world, so that whenever someone tries to visit your website they are served the version closest to them. The result is a massive boost in site speed.
2. Start a Blog
While installing a blog on its own won’t help you get more sales, doing blogging right will lead to more customers.
Research has shown that businesses that blog generate 126 percent more leads than businesses that do not blog, and further research has shown that relevancy is one of the factors that influence people to buy online.
Additional research has shown that 99 percent of people who land on your website won’t buy immediately; most online business owners lose out on the 99 percent of people that do not buy, instead of nurturing them to the point that they will be become customers.
Starting a blog ensures that you are able to nurture people who do not buy immediately by engaging and educating them with quality content on a regular basis; this establishes your credibility as an industry leader, and it puts you atop their minds whenever they need what you have to offer. The end result is better website conversions for you.
3. Use Security and Trust Seals
According to a recent Digital Current post more than anything else, trust seals establish credibility in the mind of potential buyers. The article analyzed a study conducted by Econsultancy/Toluna which reveals that trust seals are the #1 thing that instill a sense of security in the minds of consumers.
While you might not want those extra badges on your site, the reality is that they work; if we go by the Econsultancy/Toluna research earlier referenced, it could very well lead to a 48 percent increase in website conversions.
Data revealed that must buyers prefer the Norton trust seal first, followed by the McAfee trust seal. BBB, TRUSTe, Thawte, Trustwave, Geotrust, and Comodo are also recognized by most users.
4. Ensure a Seamless Checkout Process
It can be difficult balancing short-term and long-term goals when trying to capture sales, but it’s important to approach it with wisdom. While getting users to register first before they checkout makes it easy to get them to return, unless you’re a very major brand, it could be the very reason why they fail to buy.
Forcing users to register first before purchasing; having a complicated checkout form asking them for their date of birth and other irrelevant data; and other interruptions in the checkout process could lead to a significant drop in website conversions for you. Research has shown that reducing the number of fields in your checkout form will lead to an increase in sales.
If you want to capture user details, you can ask for it immediately after they’ve paid; this way, you’ll get them to buy and at the same time capture their details.
5. Offer a Return Policy
Having a return policy can double your sales, and only a fraction of customers will ever take advantage of it; no matter how you look at it, it is a winning situation for you.
Research by ComScore revealed that 66 percent of customers will review a brand’s return policy before purchasing online, and that 82 percent of consumers will purchase if there’s a free return policy.
Depending on the nature of your business, your return policy could be in the form of a product exchange or a money back policy, but data has shown that having a return policy undoubtedly helps boost product sales.