website conversion rate optimization techniques to follow in 2017There are so many processes that go into ensuring your website is working in the right way. While many focus on the design and information on their site, along with the traffic they are generating, it is also important to build up a website’s conversion rate. At the end of the day, getting 1000 unique visitors to your site on a daily basis is a good sign, but you will not be making much money out of your site if you have a really low conversion rate for those visitors.

With that in mind, we can take a look at some of the website conversion rate optimization techniques that you should be aware of. Regardless of whether or not you maintain and develop your own site or if you’ve hired the services of a digital marketing agency in London, New York or Rio, these methods will help to increase your conversion rate and your bottom line.

Keep it Simple

When the website development process gets underway, it is easy to get caught up in all the fun things you can do with your site. There are so many possibilities for adding new colors, text, fancy buttons and other features. But if you are hoping to improve your conversion rates, you need to get rid of the clutter so it’s clear to every visitor exactly what to do to get the result they want. As the co-founder of Unbounce, Oli Gardner, says: “Remove the clutter”.

Macro Not Micro

There is a tendency for both marketing agencies and website owners to focus on the little things, instead of looking at the big picture. Neil Patel, one of the most successful marketers of the past few years, believes that we need to “go macro, not micro” when it comes to the way our websites are structured. By focusing too much on tweaking your pages and making sure every little animation is perfect, you may be losing the site’s primary focus.

According to Patel, it does not matter if you are increasing your click through or achieving anything else related to your website. The only thing that matters is getting more people to buy products or services from you. Macro conversions matter above anything else, and website owners must focus on that if they want to get the most out of their sites.

Website Speed

Peep Laja, an expert on website conversion techniques, believes that “speedier websites will always win”. He also wrote an excellent blog post identifying some ways website owners can improve their speed and conversions. Now you may think that a website taking one or two extra seconds to load is not a big deal – but you would be very wrong.

According to studies done by the Aberdeen Group, even a one second delay in website loading time can have a big impact. A one second delay would result in around 10 percent less page views and a seven percent conversion loss. Now imagine if you have a gorgeous, feature-filled website that takes five or six extra seconds to load. How many conversions would you be losing then?

Choosing the Right Images

While you never want to load up your website’s landing page with too many images, they can still play a very important role in conversion rates. For instance, we can look at one example of a Dutch brokerage firm and how they managed to improve their conversion rate by 89 percent with one image change. The company altered their previous image, which featured the portrait of a woman dressed in formal clothing encouraging people to call the brokerage, to one of a man holding up a for sale sign with a “sold” sticker on top of it. The change may not seem so drastic, but it appears as though it set the right tone for the landing page, which resulted in massive conversion increases for the brokerage.

Applying similar changes to images on your site could have a very big impact on your conversion rates going forward.