7 Web Design Tips To Improve Sales for Your Business

Your website isn’t just a virtual representation of your brand. It’s your storefront online and a sales and marketing tool with the power to impact people’s buying decisions.

Good web design can get users to hang out longer on your site, click on the call to actions, and buy or sign up for what you’re offering. Bad web design, on the other hand, has people hitting the back button before they even see what you’ve to offer.

Web design, is therefore, a tool you can use to improve sales for your business. If you’re wondering exactly how you can accomplish this, this article has you covered. Implement the following web design tips when designing or revamping your website and watch as your sales soar!

Follow These Web Design Tips to Improve Sales

1. Know Your Audience and Design Your Website with Their Needs in Mind

Make your website all about your users and smile all the way to the bank. People are more likely to buy from you when they feel like your brand resonates with them.

Putting the user first when designing a website ensures that each and every visitor to your website has a positive experience and is more receptive to buying something. So how can you ensure your web design has this effect on your visitors?

What To Do:

• Research your audience and understand their needs, wants, and desires.
• Place yourself in your target users head and step in their shoes, figure out what they are after and deliver it.
• Make your web design attractive to the target audience. 38% of people lose interest and stop engaging with a website if they don’t find it attractive (Source)! You lose that many opportunities to make a sale if your website is unattractive. Furthermore, research by Stanford showed that 75% of internet users judge a business’s credibility based on its look and feel (Source).
• Pay attention to user feedback and implement highly requested features in your web design.
• Understand the user journey a typical user follows to go from first time visitor to buying something and structure your website according to this journey.
• Take a look at the top websites in your industry and draw inspiration from their web designs.
• Do you serve multiple user groups? Consider using multiple landing pages with each optimized for a specific user persona.

2. Provide A Great User Experience

Whether a visitor to your website ends up making a sale comes down to the emotional experience they’ve when browsing through your site.

If they’ve a great experience, they are likely to stick around longer. The longer they hang out on your site, the more likely they’re to buy or sign up for something or even bookmark your site for later.

A poor user experience, on the other hand, drives 89% of people to shop with a competitor (Source).If visitors cannot scroll through your site, find what they need, and pay for it with ease, then you’re losing potential sales.

Now, every element of your web design contributes to the kind of user experience your site delivers. Every aspect of your web design from your logo to the usability must work towards maximizing the user experience.

What To Do:

Make Your Web Design Simple and Clean

Simplicity is the golden rule of web design. A simple website is easy to use and it’s easier for users to buy. Take a minimalistic approach and include only the necessary elements. Adhere to the principles of visual hierarchy and place the most important information above the fold so visitors can see it without having to scroll.

Make Navigation Simple and Intuitive

Design an intuitive navigation and keep the menu clear and well organized so users can find what they need in one or two steps. Make use of a search tool and position it where it’s clearly visible.

Ensure A Seamless Experience on Mobile Devices

In this day and age, most visitors to your website will come from mobile devices. You can increase sales with responsive web design that reorients and resizes itself to display properly on any device. 18% of local smartphone searches lead to a purchase within a day (Source). This doesn’t mean that you should neglect desktop users. It’s important to provide an optimal experience no matter what device a visitor is using.  

Leverage White Space

White space refers to any space on your website that’s devoid of visual elements. When your goal is to increase sales, you can never go wrong by making use of plenty of white spaces. It keeps your site clean and keeps visitors focused on what’s important.

You might be tempted to maximize every available space by including text, visuals, or buttons but doing this clutters your site and overwhelms users to the extent that they exit your site without taking any action.

Optimize Your Web Design to Load Fast

If your web pages are taking more 3 seconds to load, you’re losing 32% of visitors to your site (Source). Those are potential sales lost even before you’ve had a chance to showcase your offerings.

The good news is that you can optimize your web design to load fast. Only use visual elements that make a powerful impact and use image optimization tools such as Smush to compress image file sizes without a compromise on image quality.

Maintain Brand Consistency

Using your brand’s visual styles, layouts, and fonts in your web design creates a professional image and builds brand recognition. People feel more comfortable buying from familiar brands.

3. Incorporate SEO into the Design

No matter how attractive and user-friendly your site is, you won’t sell if no one is visiting your website. The more visitors your website receives, the more sales it will generate.

Implementing search engine optimization (SEO) techniques can help you sell more. Ranking high in the search engines comes with increased traffic to your site. Organic search drives 51 percent of website traffic and over 40 percent of revenue (Source).

What Do To:

• Offer high-quality and valuable content. Packing your site with great content will ensure your site ranks high up the search engine results pages and receives plenty of visitors. Providing helpful information also helps build trust and foster a positive relationship with your target audience.
• Optimize tags, titles, descriptions, and content to attract free, targeted traffic.
• Create high-quality backlinks for your website.
• Optimize your website for local search. Local searches come with a high conversion rate with 28% of local business searches result into sales (Source).
• Use page speed tools such as Google PageSpeed to determine how fast or slow your web design is and how can you can speed it up.

4. Integrate Lots of Social proof to Build Customer Trust and Confidence

Trust doesn’t come easy in the digital world. It’s one of the barriers you have to overcome in order to make a sale. Customers have to trust you in order to buy from you. And there’s no better way to lend credibility to your online business and get potential buyers to trust you than by including social proof.

Genuine endorsement by customers and reliable third parties say you’re a genuine business and that you deliver on your promises. So don’t hold back on splashing the following elements of social proof on your website.

What To Do:

• Add a rating system to your website design, and ask customers to leave honest reviews.
• Place the reviews, testimonials, and certifications where visitors can easily see them
• Feature testimonials and add pictures of your customers to their testimonials if you’re able.
• Reviews and testimonials from customers should be in the customers’ own words in order to sound credible.
• Include a best sellers page to provide a quick way for first time visitors to find your best products.
• Feature trust symbols such as badges from Yelp and Trust pilot, a certification logo, or a security seal.
• Highlight the years of business you’ve under your belt and the number of awards you’ve won for your outstanding services or products.

5. Use Clear and Enticing Call to Actions (CTAs) and Make them Pop

Visitors shouldn’t have to wonder what step to take next. Clearcall to actions (CTAs) that are easy to find and engaging to the audience get more clicks and generate more sales. But don’t go overboard with the call to actions. Here are some tips for designing CTAs that generate sales.

What To Do:

• Make your unique value proposition (UVP) clear to your website visitors. It sets you apart and tells people why they should choose you.
• Use a contrasting color to make the CTA pop off the page and draw the eye.
• Make the CTAs descriptive so users will know what will happen upon clicking the CTA.
• Each page should have a clear purpose and a relevant call to action.
• Use one CTA per page and make the CTA relevant to the content and purpose of the page.
• Use short opt in forms to encourage visitors to respond.
• Don’t use too many call to actions. You risk overwhelming prospects with too many choices or turning them off.

6. Keep the Shopping Cart Checkout Process Simple

Do you get plenty of visitors but suffer a poor conversion rate? Noticing a high rate of shopping cart abandonment? Your checkout experience could be the culprit.

You can get everything right with your web design and still miss out on a sale because of a poor checkout process design. A confusing, cumbersome or buggy checkout process that keeps crushing or has too many steps is sure to hurt your sales. Potential customers will abandon such a cart and not look back.

Improving the design of a checkout process can improve conversion rates by 35% (Source). Implement the following checkout process improvement tips to make the shopping cart interface and checkout process straightforward, smooth, and transparent.

What To Do:

• Keep the checkout process short and simple. Include as few data fields as possible with only the necessary information.
• Customers should see where they’re in the check-out process and what steps they’re yet to complete. Ensure that the data fields have clear labels.
• Give customers the option to check out as a guest.
• Provide a product preview and description in the shopping cart.
• Outline the shipping options and their costs.
• Outline your return and refund policies.

7. Practice A/B Testing to Optimize Your Web Design for Conversion

Besides applying the above tried and tested web design strategies, implementing and testing small changes is the best way to find what works best for your business. This is referred to as A/B Testing and it can help you get your web design as close to 100% optimized to drive sales as possible.

What To Do:

• Make small changes to your web design and assess the impact the change has on conversions and sales.
• You can experiment with different CTAs, images, text, colors, and placement.
• Make one change to your website and give it two weeks to see the impact on conversions.
• Decide whether to keep the change or tweak it based on the results.
• Keep making small changes and using the results to optimize your web design is order to improve conversions.

Bonus Web Design Tips to Increase Sales

Communicate the Benefits of What You Offer

 It’s benefits that connect with emotions, not features. Use text and visual elements to communicate the benefits of what you offer and paint a picture of how your prospect’s life will be better thanks to your products or services. Make users understand what’s in it for them. How your products or services will solve their problem.

Use High Quality Images

67% of people rate a product’s image quality as ‘very important’ in their buying decision (Source). It pays to invest in professional photos of your products. High-quality images engage users longer, lend credibility to your business, and boost sales.

Integrate Virtual Chat

When it comes to making inquiries, most people opt for the most convenient option. They prefer using the online chat option to picking up the phone and calling or shooting an email. Seeing this option even improves trust in your brand. 38% of people follow through with their order specifically because live chat is available (Source). If your web design doesn’t include a chat option, you’re probably missing out on numerous opportunities to make a sale.

Incorporate Social Media

Take advantage of the power of social media by incorporating it into your web design. You can include social share buttons and links to your social media pages. Social media offers opportunities to connect with potential customers, build trust, and drive conversions.

That’s A Wrap!

Getting your website’s design right can help you improve sales and business success. When your target customers find your website attractive, easy to use, and engaging, they will last longer on your site, get to trust you, and ultimately buy from you.

Embracing the above web design tips will not only help you boost sales but also achieve other marketing objectives such as brand development and business growth.