Great design can leave your visitors in awe. Additionally, a well designed website can drive more traffic. So, what to look for when designing a website? And what are the key ingredients to include in your website? In this Web Design 101: The Secret to Increase Website Traffic piece, you’ll find a few tips on how to increase your website traffic by spicing up your web design game.
What is web design, and how does it improve web traffic?
First things first, what is web design? Overall, web design is what creates the look and feel when you’re using a website. It’s the process of planning, crafting, and arranging the elements of your platform including layout, structure, fonts, colors, and graphics. A good combination of them will result in great UI/UX, leading to increased traffic and long-term visitors. But as you never get a second chance to make a first impression, make sure you do things right from the start!
Without further ado, here are the ten helpful and easy tips for improving your web design.
1. Improve overall web design
Does your website make a good first impression? If not, you’ll have to fix it immediately because first impressions are 94% design-related.
You can create a good first impression through great visual design. You should ensure color consistency and choose fonts wisely. This will help you maintain a uniform design throughout the website so you’ll look more professional.
2. Think about website structure
An excellent website must be easy to navigate. Good website navigation allows visitors to easily jump from one page to another. Must-have features to improve accessibility include:
- Menu provides categories your visitors may want to explore.
- Search bar is one of the most crucial parts of a website as it allows visitors to quickly find things.
- Call-to-action buttons encourage visitors to take some desired action.
- Shopping cart. If you run an eCommerce site, a shopping cart is a necessity. It helps you increase your conversion rate.
3. Use responsive design
More and more people are using mobile devices to access the internet. In the third quarter of 2020, mobile devices shared 50.81% of the global web traffic.
Responsive design enables your website to adapt to any screen size. Thus, your website delivers the same user experience no matter how users access it. Non-mobile optimized websites can hurt your SEO.
The Zyro website builder is a great example of a simple solution that allows you to create a website supporting Google’s mobile-first approach. It provides templates with responsive design capabilities. Also, Zyro equips you with the AI Heatmap tool, allowing you to know what your visitors care the most about your website.
4. Speed up your website
Forty-seven percent of visitors will leave a website that loads more than 2 seconds. Therefore, make sure your website doesn’t take too long to load. Otherwise, you’ll lose your potential customers to your competitors.
Additionally, search engines also favor websites that load under 200 milliseconds. It’s important to monitor your site performance. For this, you can use PageSpeed Insights, a Google tool. It analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster.
5. Write clean code
One of the biggest culprits that make your site load slowly is duplicate and redundant code. The solution for this is code minification. By removing extra spaces and stripping unnecessary comments off, you can enhance your website’s load time.
Also, clean code is crucial because it affects your search engine rankings. If your code is cluttered, search engine spiders will have a hard time crawling your site. As a result, Google can push your site down the SERPs.
6. Declutter your homepage
Say your homepage is media-heavy. The page load time can surpass 2 seconds, which can result in short sessions. We suggest you declutter your homepage to keep visitors on your site longer.
Use white spaces. They’ll help you improve scannability and highlight the most important information. White spaces can also make your call-to-action buttons stand out so you can improve your conversion rate.
7. Include share buttons
Social media buttons are one of the most typical ways to drive more traffic. Yet it’s often overlooked.
If your customers are satisfied with your service, they’re likely to follow your brand across different channels and spread the word about you. Therefore, include social media buttons and generate more leads.
8.Use best practices for website scrolling
There are many ways you can incorporate scrolling into your website. The most popular include infinite scrolling, long scrolling, and parallax scrolling.
With so many scrolling options available, it may be hard to choose one. No matter the type, we suggest you use the sticky navigation on your website so your menu is always visible on top. Or you can add a scroll to top button. This will allow users to easily shoot back to the top.
9. Optimized images
Images are a big help in increasing website sessions. But images can be a big showstopper if they don’t render. Image-heavy websites are slow and affect bounce rate.
When you optimize an image, reduce the size without compromising the quality. To do this, you can use lossless compression tools such as TinyPNG. Or you can use stock photos as they have been optimized for the web.
10. Do A/B testing
A/B testing is comparing two versions of the same web page to different segments of website visitors at the same time to find out which performs better. For example, you can A/B test your CTA buttons if you want to improve the click-through rate.
Test only one thing at a time so you can see which elements made your conversion rate go down, up, or do nothing at all.
Why website traffic is important
Know that you know the tips and tricks for generating more traffic through website design, let’s see the benefits of website traffic.
- Increased traffic allows you to generate more leads. When your site captures visitors’ attention, it’s easier to turn them into qualified leads.
- Increased traffic brings more conversions.
- Whether it’s a call-to-action button CTR or newsletter subscription submissions, more traffic
- means more conversions.
- Increased traffic means more repeat visitors. A happy customer will come back again and again.
- Increased traffic leads to faster ROI. You can get a better return on investment for your marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this guide has given you a better understanding of web design principles to convert more traffic. Use these 10 design tips to get to the top of Google search results. Meanwhile, find out what we offer for mobile and web design.
