Reading Time: 6 minutes
Using the right conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies is crucial in ensuring that your website redesign achieves the goals you’d like it to. It ensures your new website is more engaging and user-friendly so visitors are more willing to check your content for longer and perform desired actions.
Unfortunately, many website redesigns fail to address the issues that were leading to few conversions in the previous version.
Identifying those issues before you start a new build can help you create a CRO strategy that addresses issues like poor UX, cart abandonment, poor layouts, and ineffective copy/CTAs.
If you’re suffering from some of these issues and considering a website redesign, you’ve come to the right place. Our comprehensive guide covers key CRO tips to make your next website redesign successful.
What Prep Should You Do Before You Start Redesigning?
Before redesigning your website for improved CRO, ask yourself:
- What are my conversion goals? Is it more sales, form submissions, email sign-ups, or software downloads?
- Am I targeting the right audience? Identify your target base using demographics, interests, and behaviors.
- How can I better communicate the value of my product or service? Focus on how what you offer can benefit the audience, not just the features.
With these answers in mind, set some concrete goals for what your new website should be able to achieve compared to the old one. The more clarity you have at this stage, the better the output.
Top 5 CRO Tips for a Website Rebuild
1. Understand Your Users’ Behaviors on the Old Website
It’s important to establish how users interacted with your old website to redesign your pages for enhanced conversions.
If users used to find the whole process of going from your landing pages to completing purchases tedious, you need to correct that to see better follow throughs.
Likewise, identify the things they weren’t doing previously on the site that you’d like them to do on your updated site. For instance, they may not be clicking important CTAs.
Understanding their actions at every step of the purchasing funnel ensures you streamline their buying process.
Also, identify the areas in your old website that attract the most interaction and where the visitor bounce rate comes from.
You can study areas of your website that your customer linger on or avoid the most by studying their heat maps. Use tools like Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar, which protects user privacy with on-page suppression, to do this. With insights you can establish areas which visitors scroll through, click, or disregard.
There are various heatmaps, like:
- Scroll maps: These establish the percentage of users that scroll to a given point on a page.
- Move maps: These track where users direct their cursors on desktops and laptops.
- Click/touch maps: These use red, yellow, and orange colors to establish where users click or tap.
- Device heatmaps: These compare your site’s desktop, mobile, and tablet performance.
- Rage click maps: These highlight the most frustrating areas on your pages.
- Engagement maps: These provide a well-rounded view of user engagement, including data from move, click, and scroll maps.
2. Optimize Your Landing Pages
Landing page optimization should be among your top priorities during a CRO. It ensures you maximize your ability to earn conversions by lowering bounce rates.
According to studies, reducing distractions on landing pages improves conversions by up to 10%, while including contact details increases the rate by 14.8%.
This is where your heat map information can help. Using that data, identify areas of the website that fail to capture their attention. Maybe you need to spice up your copy or improve some layouts. Make note of these. Here are some other ways to use heat maps to optimize your landing pages:
- Layout: If your scroll map indicates that users leave at a certain point, move the most crucial elements above it. For example, you can shift a vital call-to-action (CTA) higher up to increase your conversions.
- Images: Consider replacing less-clicked images with more captivating or informative ones to ensure users stick around for longer.
- Colors: To boost engagement, consider using more attractive colors in less-clicked sections. For example, you can use more appealing CTA colors to make them stand out.
- Headlines: Consider revising less-clicked headlines to make them resonate more or grab user attention better.
- Copy: If users aren’t scrolling as much as you’d want on your landing pages to crucial CTAs, revise the copy to make it more engaging. Likewise, edit poor CTAs to make them more urgent and captivating.
- User flow: Are certain areas of your landing pages challenging or confusing to use? Use your rage click and move map data to enhance the user experience through flow adjustments.
3. Improving the Site’s Loading Speed
Loading speeds are one of the most crucial determinants of your conversion rate. In fact,
- 47% of consumers only wait up to two seconds for your pages to load.
- 40% of searchers leave sites that load for over three seconds.
- Slow-loading sites cause $2.6 billion in annual revenue losses.
As Entrepreneur Stalin Kay notes, “To elevate your conversion rates, start by making your website load in under three seconds.”
Test and ensure your updated website loads quickly. Some of the tools you can use are Pingdom and PageSpeed Insights.
These tools suggest where to tweak to boost your speed.
For instance, here are some PageSpeed Insights recommendations for Forbes’ mobile website:
Same image source as above.
Here are are some effective ways to boost website page speed:
- Try a content delivery network: This allows users to access your website from multiple servers, reducing subsequent speed drops.
- Minimize redirects: Use tools like Screaming Frog to identify your redirects, then remove some if necessary. Fewer redirects are especially crucial for your mobile site. The fewer you have, the fewer HTTP requests and the faster your website.
- Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML: Unnecessary formatting, space, character, and unused code can slow your site. So, optimize your website to remove such issues.
- Reduce TTFB (time to first byte): Some ways to do this include using a fast host, leveraging a CDN, and enabling browser caching.
- Image optimization: Resize large images with tools like TinyPNG. Also, consider friendlier image formats like PNG and JPG rather than GIFs.
4. Run A/B Tests
You can’t conduct effective CRO without A/B tests. These assessments help you identify the best variations of different elements that’ll provide the highest conversion rates.
You can perform A/B tests on your website’s different versions or specific components, like landing pages.
Some of the tips for seamless A/B testing include:
- Start with minor changes: Assess different CTAs, images, or headlines.
- Test one thing at a time: Progressive testing allows you to determine the impact of each change.
- Ensure statistical significance: The difference in the result shouldn’t be by chance. To achieve statistical significance, ensure you have a significant sample size.
- Be consistent: Create a schedule for testing different elements and analyze substitutes simultaneously.
- Leverage the right tools: Heat maps can help you establish which changes impact most. Also, incorporate A/B testing software like Google Optimize and Optimizely. Tracking tools like Google Analytics are indispensable in providing comprehensive conversion, traffic, and user behavior reports. You should also include user feedback tools like Hotjar and Qualaroo.
5. Utilize Social Proof on the Redesigned Website
Including social proof during CRO is crucial in building trust quickly and ensuring visitors convert. That’s because 92% of users might not buy if your redesigned website doesn’t have reviews.
Some of the social proof types you can add to your new website include:
- Star ratings
- Testimonials
- User reviews
- “Used by” icons
- “Featured in” buttons
- Industry expert reviews
- Celebrity endorsements
- “Just purchased” pop-ups
You can collect social proof from your existing users by requesting it via email, after purchases, through online forms, or surveys.
It’s essential to place social proof in the right places to drive conversions. Some of the best social proof placements include:
- Blog
- Sidebar
- Cart page
- Homepage
- Case studies
- Landing page
- Near your newsletter sign-up form
Finally, remember to respond to negative reviews on time. In fact, 45% of users are more likely to check your offers if you respond to negative reviews.
Conclusion
Effective conversion rate optimization strategies for your website redesign start by understanding your visitors. Once you know how users interact with landing pages, you can optimize them accordingly and ensure they load quickly.
A/B testing offers you the best choices from your multiple optimizations and allows you to continually experiment and refine your site to optimize its performance.
Adding social proof complements your other updates and improves the conversion rate.
If you’d like to ease the process, reach out and kickstart your CRO with a free quote.
At Vizion Interactive, we have the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm to get results and keep clients happy! Learn more about how our CRO services can increase sales and boost your ROI. But don’t just take our word for it, check out what our clients have to say, along with our case studies.
