Is Your Site Structure Costing You Money?

By now, I’m sure you’re aware – content is so important! It helps drive traffic to your website and increases the number of eyes on your business or service. That’s all well and good, but what happens when you get all of this traffic and have nothing to show for it?! What are you doing wrong? 

In order to maximize conversions, there should be a focus on your website structure.

So let’s take a look at a few of the site structure factors that could be costing you money!

Site Structure Factors That Could Be Costing You Money:

Page Load Speed

If your landing pages take too long to load, your visitors are going to click away before they even know what it is you’re offering. Load time is so important because as page speed decreases, bounce rates increase. 

Poor bounce rates are not only important to Search Engines and are a ranking factor for SEO, they are also important to keep track of so you can improve on your website conversions and ultimately make the sales you are looking for. 

We live in a world where anything we want can be at the tip of our fingers in a matter of seconds. With convenience as a key to life these days, most users on the internet expect webpages to load quickly. 

According to Unbounce, “A 100-millisecond delay in load time can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%.”

There are several free platforms you can use to test your website’s page speed for both mobile and desktop applications. A couple of our favorites are GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights by Google Developers. 

These tools will not only show you your loading time and score, they will also tell you which areas you need to improve on and which areas are most detrimental to your website’s page speed and loading times. 

Content Placement (Including Mobile!!)

Within the web design industry, the terms “above the fold” and “below the fold” refer to the location that content sits when you open a webpage. Anything that appears without the need to scroll would be “above the fold” and anything that requires scrolling down would be considered “below the fold.” 

This placement is very important, especially when considering optimizing for alternative devices. A webpage will appear different on desktop versus mobile. 

Consider placing your calls to action toward the top of your webpage, test out the placement on different devices. If your visitors don’t know what action to take or how to get there, they will likely bounce.

By placing your CTA button or form above the fold will immediately draw attention to the action you want the user to take, which is always helpful when trying to boost website conversions. 

Calls to Action

Speaking of calls to action… make sure you have some!

If you’re looking for your website to serve a purpose besides a hub for information on your business and products/services, make sure you encourage your users to take action through adding call to action buttons or forms on your landing pages. 

A “call to action” is a marketing term for prompting an immediate response or encouraging an immediate action or sale. 

And as we mentioned earlier, the easier your CTAs are to find, the more likely a visitor will take action. 

Clearing the Clutter

A landing page should be simple and concise. You should have one goal and that goal should be easily understood by your visitors.

Avoid confusing your visitors with extra links and options to choose from. Don’t bombard them with too much information. Excess clutter on your landing pages will drive away visitors. By including navigation bars, external links, and lengthy content, you give your viewers the opportunity to click away from your landing page. 

Take a look at your site and see if there are any subtly confusing areas. Perhaps reach out to friends and family to get an outside perspective. Get down to the basics and simplify your design. 

So give these tips a try, modify your website to fix the issues detailed above and see how it affects your conversion rate.

Be sure to check out some of our previous blog posts for more tips on increasing conversions! 

And feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need help getting started.