Web Design Bloopers that Drown Conversions and What You Can Do

Clear the clutter off your site to improve conversion
Source: Flickr

Are you the owner of a sparkling new website? Are you doing everything right but still you don't get enough conversions? If so, then you have come to the right place. 

There are a few key things that usually kill your conversion ratio but fortunately they can be easily rectified by modifying your site slightly. Once you get rid of these trouble making elements, you will see for yourself how quickly your leads grow.

Clear the clutter

One of the biggest reasons why most websites have a low conversion rate is because these websites are overloaded. 

Widgets, badges, social media plugins are all very good. They play their role in marketing your content but too much of anything is bad. This is the biggest mistake most businesses make and that is to clutter their websites with so many widgets and badges and plugins that your visitors lose focus. Instead of buying your products, they end up bouncing off your pages. 

As a result, your bounce rate increases and conversion rate plummets; bad for business as well as SEO. Keep everything to a bare minimum so your site won't lack any features. Also it won't obstruct your content.

The ideal sidebar

If you take a small tour of the web, you will find two kinds of sites. Those that confuse users with needless call to actions and plugins and those with a clean and neat sidebar with only relevant information. 

A simple look at the page rankings would tell you that those with the neat sidebar rank higher and have high conversion rates. These websites maintain a perfect blend of call to actions and content on their sidebars. 

An ideal sidebar should begin with a call to action such as a subscribe form or RSS feed followed by links to previous and popular posts. Anything more can act like a distraction. You might include a couple of ads but too many ads may increase your downtime and bounce rate.

This structure allows your visitors to easily explore your site and find exactly what they are looking for. The call to action is to convert your visitors to leads and the relevant posts helps visitors to browse your website in search of what they want. 

Finally, the popular posts will attract a great number of clicks simply because people consider these posts to be of great value just because other people like them. The sidebar is certainly something you should be considering for your SEO web design efforts.

Smart landing pages for smart conversions

Landing pages are among the most controversial parts of web design. People constantly argue if they should use landing pages or not. A badly designed landing page quite easily gets discarded as spam. But when designed smartly, they can quadruple your conversion rates. 

The placement of landing pages is also important. People usually place landing pages at wrong places and end up getting a lot of cold traffic sources. Conversion rates will obviously be low from cold sources.

Landing pages and iron have one thing in common and that is “hit it when it's hot.” You need to land traffic sources that are still warm on your landing pages. So the next question is where do you trap this warm traffic from? 

The answer is actually quite simple - from your sidebar. Your main content is usually the centre of attraction for your visitors. Once they are done reading your posts they want something more and they often click on another link from your sidebar. This is an indication that the traffic source is warm and it's the cue for a landing page with a subscription form or anything else.