7 UX Best Practices to Boost Conversion Rates
User experience, or UX, is one of the most important factors in business website design. What your customers see, how they interact with the page, and how they navigate the site all shape their experience. Great UX design inspires customers to buy, refer, return, and smoothly enables every conversion. Increasing your conversion rate doesn’t require a complex set of features. Simply applying tried-and-true UX best practices can make a huge difference in your website’s engagement and conversion rates.
The best thing is that you can make these improvements without investing in a large-scale redesign. Just a few practical changes to a currently functioning website can empower your customers and eliminate conversion obstacles.
Why Use UX Best Practices?
Best practices are methods that provide the greatest benefit to most people. They are guidelines put in place because they are proven to work. So, it makes sense to apply UX best practices to your website.
In website design, these are related to flow, aesthetics, and usability. An overseeing board does not decide these practices; instead, they are defined by the customers.
Why do we put navigation along the top and contact information in the footer?
Why do we have the live chat icon in the lower right-hand corner?
It’s because that’s what works best for users.
By following these best practices, you can provide visitors with an easier, more enjoyable experience. And in the process, you can look forward to a dramatic increase in engagement and conversion rates!
But that’s not all…
As mentioned above, you can implement these best practices without spending hundreds or even thousands on a redesign. That’s because they are well within most websites’ capabilities. Most websites are only a few tweaks away from boosting conversion rates by properly applying UX best practices.
What Are Some UX Best Practices to Apply?
Now that you have a better understanding of why you should apply UX best practices to your site, it’s time to look at what those actually are.
To prevent you from feeling overwhelmed by all the possibilities, we’ve compiled a list of just 7 changes/additions you can make to your site.
1) Add Videos to Landing Pages
If you’ve browsed new brands and website designs recently, you may have noticed a rising trend in landing page videos. These are video headers and embedded videos that draw in your landing page visitors and invite them to learn more. This isn’t just a fad—it’s an emerging best practice. Landing page videos are recommended because they catch the eye of your website visitors and draw viewers into a more immersive experience.
Embedded videos are typically implemented via YouTube. You can weave your video and player locations into the page’s layout as part of content panels. That way, you can use video to explain key points or provide vivid eye-candy illustrations.
However, animated infographics are often more immediately engaging than even an embedded player.
Animated headers are another recent trend in landing page design. In fact, they are part of many premade website templates. An animated header uses a video instead of an image for your above-the-fold header panel and page title background. With the right relaxing, inviting views, these panels can engage users immediately through imagery and motion.
2) Be Consistent with Color and Font
One of the most important UX best practices is to be consistent in your choice of font and color. This sounds like a simple rule of thumb, but you might be surprised how many web designs defy this essential best practice.
Why are font and color important?
Your website is a virtual venue, and a landing page is like a private guest room in that venue. Each landing page is an experience—one that should match your brand and guide customers down that first critical step of the conversion funnel.
A consistent choice in font gives your brand personality and your pages a readable uniformity. Do you choose a stately font, a playful font, or possibly even a dramatic font? You will likely choose two or three fonts to use in different contexts, like paragraphs, titles, and captions. Use those same fonts the same way on every page and landing page to create a consistent brand environment and help your customers learn to identify your brand by sight.
Your color choices are even more crucial. For a brand, color consistency is everything. It is how customers spot your brand from a distance and how they know they are on a legitimate landing page (not a hacker’s spoof). Often, your choice of color will make your loyal customers smile each time they see your consistent brand color palette.
If you choose a unique palette for the product or campaign, be consistent in this, too.
3) Aim for Fast Page Speed and Stable Loading
Another UX best practice to implement is aiming for the following:
- Fast page load speed
- Good responsiveness
- Stable page loading
Google will not promote pages that have a too-long response time or that jump around too much as they load. This is called page speed and stable loading. If certain metrics aren’t met, Google is unlikely to show your page on search results pages (SERPs) or give your page a high ranking.
You will need to optimize your site to increase page speed and stabilize page load. Stable page loading means that the elements don’t jump when they load in. All photos already take up their set amount of space so that even if elements load in slowly, readers can steadily scroll through written content uninterrupted. Page speed also requires tuning your server and your assets to reduce the weight of each page load.
4) Provide Clear Calls to Action (CTAs)
Always have a clear call to action. This is where you tell a visitor what to do next and how to become a customer—or how to follow the next step in your conversion funnel. Whether you want them to “Shop Now” or “Book a Demo,” it's important to highlight what action they should take in a clear and easy-to-understand manner.
The right CTAs can drastically improve your conversion rate. Give people a reason, a promise, and a big button to press, and they will be more likely to go from casual visitors to paying customers.
Solid CTAs have the following characteristics:
- The text is usually on the short side (2-4 words).
- The button is placed where the eyes go (e.g., in the upper right-hand corner).
- The CTA button is in a bold color that stands out from the page.
5) Make Contact Details Noticeable
Making your contact details easy to find is also one of the most critical UX best practices. Whether a potential customer wants to ask a question before purchasing—or you require contact before conversion—you need to be easily accessible through your website.
Don’t make people search high and low for contact details!
Instead, feature your NAP (name, address, phone number) at the top and/or bottom of each page. And ensure your contact page is clearly labeled in your navigation.
6) Ensure Good Readability and Scannability
The content on your site needs to be engaging, but it also needs to be scannable and easy to read. Pages should have large, eye-catching, and well-written subheadings that help visitors understand exactly what they are looking at.
Use a combination of bullet points, scannable subheadings, and concise paragraphs to provide the depth of information people are looking for.
In this way, you improve the readability of your pages with simple, engaging content. You also improve the scannability with well-organized and highly visible subheadings.
7) Intuitive Search Functionality
Finally, an intuitive search feature is also one of the essential UX best practices for any business website. A search feature searches just your internal pages for information your visiting users might need. However, many, many internal search features are worse than simply using Google, which means you could risk losing a potential customer if your search function doesn’t measure up.
Your internal search feature needs to be able to find service pages, product pages, and blogs—not just one category. It must also be relatively ad-result-free and offer results with readable page titles and descriptions. Intuiting what your searcher is looking for is ideal and will win customers on this ease-of-use alone.
Takeaway
Sometimes, the smallest tweaks can have a major impact on your conversion rates. So, take the time to look at your site and determine what could be preventing visitors from taking advantage of your offerings. Implement the UX best practices listed here to improve the experience you provide visitors. Want to learn more about what could be holding your business back? Request a free marketing audit today!
At Viral Solutions we are committed to seeing YOU succeed. It is our goal to grow your business with proven digital marketing strategies that will help your business for the long haul.
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