Web Design Tips That Improve Your Website Conversion Rate

If a hundred people visit your website this month and two ring you, doubling your traffic is one way to get four calls. Fixing the page so four of the original hundred ring is the cheaper way, and you can usually do it in an afternoon.

None of what follows is clever. It is the same seven things we change on nearly every site we take over, in rough order of how much difference they make.

1. Say what you do and where, above the fold

Somebody landing on your homepage should know within a few seconds what you do, who you do it for and roughly where you work. Not your founding story. Not your values. The service and the area.

Lead with the benefit rather than the job title. Emergency plumber covering Cardiff and the Vale, usually same day tells somebody more in eight words than a paragraph about your commitment to quality ever will. Keep the headline short, add one supporting line, and put a phone number next to it.

2. Make the call to action say what happens next

Submit and click here are the two weakest buttons in common use, because they describe what you do to the button rather than what the visitor gets. Get my free quote, book a callback and see our prices all tell someone what is on the other side.

• Start with a verb: get, book, see, request.
• Say what they receive, not what they give.
• Make it big enough to tap with a thumb without zooming in.
• Use a colour that is not used anywhere else on the page.
• Put one near the top of every page, not just at the bottom.

3. Cut your form down to what you actually need

Every field you add costs you enquiries. For a local service business you need a name, a way to reply, and a sentence about the job. Everything else, the title dropdown, the how did you hear about us, the second phone number, is there for your convenience and against your interests.

If you need more detail to quote properly, ask for it in the reply. By then you are in a conversation rather than facing a wall of boxes.

4. Put your phone number where a thumb already is

A good share of people who want a local trade or service would rather ring than type. If your number is in the footer only, or sitting in an image, or not tappable on a phone, you are losing those people silently. They do not bounce angrily, they just ring the next firm.

Put it in the header on every page, make it a real link so a tap dials it, and repeat it near the bottom of long pages. We put it in both places on every site we build for exactly this reason.

5. Make it fast, especially on mobile data

Speed is not a design question, it is a conversion question. Someone standing in a car park on a patchy signal will not wait for a six megabyte hero image to arrive.

• Compress every image and serve modern formats. This alone fixes most slow small business sites.
• Strip out plugins, sliders and third party scripts you are not actively using.
• Avoid loading four different web fonts when one will do.
• Host somewhere decent. Cheap shared hosting is a false economy when it is the first thing a visitor experiences.

6. Show proof near the decision, not on a separate page

Reviews buried on a testimonials page are read by almost nobody. The place they work is next to the thing you are asking for: beside the quote form, under the price, next to the service you want people to book.

Real photos of your actual work beat stock images comfortably here, even when the photos are only taken on a phone. People are checking whether you are real. A genuine picture of a finished job in a street they recognise does that better than a polished photo of somebody else's.

7. Be straight about price

The commonest reason people leave a service website is that they cannot work out what it costs and assume the worst. You do not need a full price list. A starting figure, a typical range, or an explanation of what drives the cost is enough to stop someone bouncing to a competitor who told them something.

We take our own advice on this, which is why every plan and figure sits openly on our web design prices page rather than behind a form.

What to do first

1. 1Open your homepage on your phone and time how long it takes to be usable.
2. 2Read the first screen and ask whether a stranger would know what you do and where.
3. 3Count the fields on your contact form and delete any you do not need to reply.
4. 4Check your phone number is tappable on mobile and visible in the header.
5. 5Move your two best reviews next to your main call to action.

Most of that is an afternoon. If you would rather it was done for you, every site we build starts with these decisions already made, and our clients page shows how they look in practice.

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