A guest post by Michael Deane. 

Achieving high conversion rates is the holy grail of every marketer. And yet, despite all their efforts, cold, hard stats say the average website conversion rate is only 2.35%.

And you already know if you manage to increase Conversions, the more sales you will score.

However, in an attempt to impress their Visitors and add value, many marketers and business owners tend to clutter their websites with numerous offers, plugins and elaborate visuals. While such an approach might seem like a good idea, complex and intricate website design has a couple of downsides.

You’ll find out why the “less is more” tactic works better when it comes to increase conversions on your blog and how to implement it.

Leverage negative space

Clutter is confusing and can prevent your website visitors from noticing important marketing messages and calls to action, both of which will result in lower conversion rates.

Using negative or white space gives your blog some breathing space. It allows you to highlight specific elements your visitors should pay attention to. It doesn’t have to be literally white – any solid colour that goes well with the general layout will do.

Another benefit of using negative space is improving legibility, readability and comprehension. Increasing white space between paragraphs helps your visitors to understand your content better.

Avoid cramming in long sections and paragraphs in your blog posts. This makes the reading experience poor, which will impact on the chance to increase conversions.

Use concise opt-in forms

Many people don’t like opt-in forms, and they want to fill them out as quickly as possible. When presented with a longer form, they simply ignore it.

This means that if you ask for too much information, you risk losing a lot of potential subscribers.

Since this is one of the most important elements of every website and blog, you should be very careful when creating it. The trick is to trim the number of fields and obtain only the essential information about your prospects. This is so you can get in touch with them later and ask them everything you need to know.

Exercise minimalism and, if possible, stick to one or two fields at most if you want to increase conversions.

Optimise your images

Visuals play an important role in your blog posts.

Images, infographics, videos, GIFs, and memes are used for breaking up the content and making it easier to read. Besides, people are visual beings, and they like it when a piece of information is presented via the above-mentioned visually-oriented content types.

The images you add have to be clear and of high quality. But this also means they will take longer to load, slow down your website and prompt many impatient visitors to bounce off. As you can guess, this is extremely bad if you wish to increase conversions.

To prevent this scenario, compress the images you use to make sure your website loads quickly. Given that almost 50% of people expect a website to load within 3 seconds, it’s obvious that you should optimise your images to live up to your audience’s expectations.

Optimise the typography

Choosing the right typeface for your blog is one of the biggest decisions that you have to make during the design process. You don’t want your visitors to squint and second-guess what they have just read.

It’s easy to succumb to the allure of fun or unique fonts, but you should still focus on the standard ones. This way, you won’t have to worry that these aesthetically pleasing fonts are distracting your readers.

Another thing that you should bear in mind is not every font displays the same on different devices and screen sizes. The solution to this issue is testing the typeface you choose on every device to ensure it displays well and it’s legible. Don’t forget a lot of people access websites from their mobile devices, so check how a particular font works on smartphones too.

It’s also crucial to make your blog mobile-responsive if you want to increase conversions, as otherwise, your rankings will suffer, while your visitors won’t stick around once they find out they have to zoom in and out all the time.

Ensure visual consistency

People like and more readily engage with familiar things.

In other words, although innovative design can be attractive, think twice before surprising your readers.

More importantly, if your homepage is simple and minimalistic, your visitors will assume that the rest of your blog or website is the same. And if this isn’t the case, it will be difficult for them to navigate and find their way around.

Stick to the same colour scheme throughout your website, and always place your logo in the top left corner of every web page. That’s where people always expect to see it. This means your logo serves not only as a vehicle for increasing brand awareness, but also as a landmark to help your visitors orient themselves when they’re browsing your blog.

Ready to increase conversions on your website?

Minimalist design can significantly improve user experience and encourage the visitors of your blog to convert and become subscribers.

About the author

Michael Deane has been working in marketing for almost a decade and has worked with a huge range of clients, which has made him knowledgeable on many different subjects. He has recently rediscovered a passion for writing and hopes to make it a daily habit. You can read more of Michael’s work at Qeedle.

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