You’ve had an amazing site developed, your organic traffic is looking pretty healthy, but your conversion rate is way lower than where you want to be . Why? There’s a range of elements that can prevent a user from converting on-site. Here’s a few to consider:

Product details and specifications

Are your products outlined thoroughly with all the information necessary included? If the answer is no, then this could potentially be your biggest downfall and the answer to (some of) your problems. If your customers don’t know what they’re buying, will they be ready to commit to buying it? Probably not.

Maybe your website does have plenty of information about the products but the information is buried deep down within pages, links within links. Statistically, 59 seconds is all it takes for a user to make up their mind about being on your site.

If they can find what they’re looking for within that period, then great. Design it with the user in mind so that the experience positively entices purchases or returning users. If not, they’ll find a site where they can easily access and digest the information they want.

Most likely your biggest competitor.

Site speed

According to Google most sites lose their visitors during load time. A non-optimised desktop and mobile site means that you could potentially be losing out on some pretty good leads. In the age of mobile first, if your site doesn’t stack up for a fast and reliable load time, the user experience will be poor which could break the trust between them and you.

Call to actions (CTA)

Depending on the site either brochure or eCommerce you’ll need at the very least one on page CTA so that users know what the next step is, where to go on site, where to get information, how to share, or how to purchase (£££). These principles are crucial in users being able to navigate the site without leaving the page to get help or giving up and going to a competitor.

Contact

Visitors to your site may have a quick question before they convert, i.e. delivery cost, how data is stored when signing up to something or storing credit card details (especially significant in light of GDPR).

In theory, all of this information should be located on your site, in a designated space relevant for the category it fits.

However, some visitors may still need to have a chat with someone before converting. Displaying a phone number, email address, contact form, or social media links are great ways of allowing the user to contact you. Even better, a live chat feature on site allows easy and instant contacting in the midst of their conversion.

Images

Imagine you’re in the supermarket, grabbing something to eat or doing your weekly shop. You stumble across an aisle with the shelves stacked full but the boxes are plain with no packaging, there’s no advertising, and you’re not sure what’s inside. Do you buy it? Unless you love a surprise, the answer will be no.

Images are crucial for user experience, site aesthetic, and leveraging customer experience (hopefully) leading to a conversion. Visitors and users need a preview of what it is you want them to buy before you can even expect them to consider clicking the add to basket button.