Why is conversion rate so important?

Con­ver­sion rate is the per­cent­age of web­site vis­i­tors or users who take a desired action. The action could be a click, a sale, or a mail­ing list sign-up.

Con­ver­sion rate is an essen­tial met­ric for e‑commerce busi­ness own­ers to mon­i­tor, as it indi­cates the per­for­mance of spe­cif­ic web pages, mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, email designs, and more.

Keep­ing an eye on con­ver­sion rate means under­stand­ing why users feel com­pelled to com­plete spe­cif­ic actions that ben­e­fit your busi­ness and what can be done to encour­age these actions if per­for­mance is poor.

Why might websites have low conversion rates?

Web­sites could have low con­ver­sion rates for a wide range of reasons:

Mis­use of CTAs

• There are too many CTAs on web pages which results in users being over­whelmed or confused
• The CTA is unclear, result­ing in low engage­ment lev­els among visitors

Poor user experience

• The check­out process is over­ly com­pli­cat­ed and dif­fi­cult, result­ing in users aban­don­ing their carts
• The UX (e.g., nav­i­ga­tion, fil­ter­ing, and sort­ing) of the web­site is poor, result­ing in con­fused or frus­trat­ed visitors
• The web­site isn’t opti­mised for mobile use, result­ing in high­er mobile bounces
• There isn’t any chat­bot or live chat box to help cus­tomers when they get stuck
• The web­site loads too slow­ly, which caus­es frus­tra­tion in vis­i­tors, and they quit the web page

Low trust­wor­thi­ness

• The web­site’s design is out­dat­ed, result­ing in an untrust­wor­thy first impres­sion. Users don’t feel safe mak­ing pur­chas­es, so they leave the website
• The busi­ness’s mar­ket­ing tech­niques are spam­my or poor­ly designed, result­ing in low trust among recipients

Inef­fec­tive marketing

• The web­site SEO isn’t opti­mised, so your web pages aren’t show­ing up in the SERPs
• The busi­ness isn’t mak­ing use of fol­low-ups or remar­ket­ing tech­niques (e.g., aban­doned cart emails)

Low prod­uct engagement

• Users don’t under­stand your prod­uct or why it will ben­e­fit them
• The images of prod­ucts are poor, and so they fail to engage web­site visitors
• The copy­writ­ing around prod­ucts does­n’t con­vey the val­ue of prod­ucts effectively

If your web­site’s got a low con­ver­sion rate, there are loads of things you can do to improve it. This process is known as con­ver­sion rate opti­mi­sa­tion (CRO), which can involve numer­ous strate­gies and test­ing methods.

The strat­e­gy we’ll explore in this arti­cle is relaunch­ing your entire web­site, which can tack­le a wide range of issues.

Why should businesses relaunch their websites?

Web­site relaunch­es address five main issues that relate to con­ver­sion rate:

1) Improve responsiveness

Relaunch­ing a web­site is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to improve things like site load­ing time, mobile opti­mi­sa­tion, and oth­er things that relate to site respon­sive­ness, such as navigation.

2) Boost SEO

Relaunch­ing a web­site can involve lots of SEO work, from tech­ni­cal and on-page improve­ments. It’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty to take stock of key­word usage across all web pages, from a site’s hero page to its prod­uct descriptions.

Busi­ness­es might need to define their meta tags and set up redi­rects or cre­ate cat­e­go­ry pages that act as fun­nels for their prod­uct pages.

3) Improve user experience

A web­site relaunch is a per­fect time to update ele­ments relat­ing to user expe­ri­ence. Improv­ing load­ing time is one thing but get­ting a UX design­er on board at this stage can be extreme­ly valu­able. Allow them to update things such as CTA usage and the check­out process to improve user experience.

4) Modernise website design

If you feel that your web­site’s design is out­dat­ed, a relaunch is exact­ly what it needs. Spend this time updat­ing and mod­ernising all ele­ments so that users’ first impres­sions are aligned with your com­pa­ny’s vision of itself.

5) Conduct technical updates

If you’ve iden­ti­fied tech­ni­cal issues that are caus­ing a low con­ver­sion rate, a relaunch is a per­fect way to tack­le lots of prob­lems in one go. Use this time to update and upgrade your con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem, plu­g­ins, theme, serv­er, and hosting.

If any of these rea­sons res­onate with your busi­ness, keep read­ing to learn how you can relaunch your site in three steps to improve its con­ver­sion rate

How to relaunch a website in three steps

Step 1: the “before” phase

The first step in relaunch­ing your web­site is iden­ti­fy­ing why you’re doing it. You need to define key areas you intend to improve so that you can map out your plan of action.

You might already know what’s wrong with your web­site. But if not, use the list above to iden­ti­fy areas of interest.

Whether you want to improve your CTAs, user expe­ri­ence, trust­wor­thi­ness, mar­ket­ing, prod­uct engage­ment, SEO, respon­sive­ness, or tech­ni­cal aspects, make a list out­lin­ing your main concerns.

Ensure that you only focus on ele­ments that are high­ly like­ly to be caus­ing seri­ous prob­lems because you don’t want to waste your mon­ey on small fry.

Once you know what you want to fix, get in con­tact with spe­cial­ists who can help. You might want to con­tract the ser­vices of any of the fol­low­ing professionals:

• Con­ver­sion rate optimiser
• Web design­er
• UX design­er
• On-page SEO specialist
• Tech­ni­cal SEO specialist
• Web devel­op­er
• Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing manager
• Copy­writer

Make sure to record KPIs as they stand before you make any changes or relaunch your web­site. Make a note of traf­fic lev­els, page speed, bounce rate, con­ver­sion rate, sign-ups, and aver­age time spent. That way, you’ll be able to see the extent of your relaunch’s success.

Top tip: a suc­cess­ful web­site relaunch always takes data into account. When not­ing down your KPIs, do some com­peti­tor analy­sis. What con­ver­sion rates are sim­i­lar busi­ness­es see­ing? How much traf­fic do they tend to cap­ture, and how often is their con­tent being shared on social media? Know­ing these sta­tis­tics will put your goals and fail­ings into per­spec­tive, pro­vid­ing clar­i­ty to your strategy.

Step 2: the “during” phase

Once you know what you want to achieve from your con­ver­sion rate opti­mi­sa­tion jour­ney, it’s time to start imple­ment­ing the nec­es­sary changes.

Not all of the fol­low­ing check­lists will apply to every web­site’s relaunch, as every­one’s goals and needs will be dif­fer­ent. Nev­er­the­less, use the rel­e­vant check­lists to ensure your “dur­ing” phase is thor­ough and effective:

Plan your web­site’s new structure:

• Cre­ate a list of new pages you want to add to your website
• Iden­ti­fy low-per­form­ing pages or those with no val­ue or aim (remove or improve them)
• Map out the inter­nal links you intend to create
• Define clear and sin­gu­lar CTAs for each webpage
• Ensure each web­page is acces­si­ble and pro­vides help­ful infor­ma­tion to any vis­i­tor requirement

Rein­vent your web­site’s design

• Cre­ate an entire­ly new style guide with the help of a design­er, keep­ing in mind your key val­ues (e.g., min­i­mal­ism, play­ful­ness, or authority)
• Ensure style and design guide­lines are catered to mobile as well as desk­top devices
• Cre­ate style tiles, wire­frames, and a sitemap

Opti­mise user experience

• Out­line dif­fer­ent jour­neys prospects will want to take through your webpages
• Iden­ti­fy one clear CTA per web page
• Make space for acces­si­ble information
• Cre­ate a chat box or FAQ section
• Cre­ate entic­ing CTA but­ton designs
• Clar­i­fy the pur­pose of each and every webpage
• Weed out dis­trac­tions and sur­plus ele­ments on each webpage

Boost SEO

• Make sure the web­site is crawlable and indexable
• Use HTTPS
• Install an image com­pres­sion plugin
• Ensure the web­site is acces­si­ble at one domain
• Fix bro­ken links, bro­ken pages, and dupli­cate content
• Con­duct key­word research for each web­page – even non-blog pages such as prod­uct pages
• Cre­ate SEO-friend­ly con­tent for each webpage
• Start a blog if you haven’t already – pro­duc­ing help­ful and acces­si­ble con­tent for your tar­get market
• Use short but high­ly descrip­tive URLs, com­pelling meta descrip­tions, and com­pelling title tags
• Cre­ate inter­nal links between the web­site’s pages only when applicable
• Ensure your images aren’t too big to slow load­ing speed

Improve site responsiveness

• Reduce the num­ber of redi­rects and roundtrips to first render
• Reduce image size and any­thing else that slows site load­ing speed
• Ask your web design­er to allow for touchscreens
• Adopt a flu­id grid
• Reduce web­site ele­ments on mobile to adjust to small­er screens
• Use view­ports to improve respon­sive­ness across device types

Con­duct tech­ni­cal updates

• Update your con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem, plu­g­ins, and web­site theme
• Upgrade your site host­ing plan and server

Boost prod­uct engagement

• Enlist the help of a copy­writer to rewrite your prod­uct descrip­tions, land­ing pages, and any oth­er pages that dis­cuss your prod­ucts or ser­vices – these need to be craft­ed in a way that entices visitors
• Take new pho­tos and videos of your prod­ucts in a way that makes them look irre­sistible, and that clear­ly dis­plays their uses, fea­tures, and functions

Rein­vent your mar­ket­ing strategies

• Ensure cam­paign URLs are func­tion­ing cor­rect­ly so that you can eas­i­ly track them
• Cre­ate entic­ing pop-ups for mail­ing list sign-ups so that you can fol­low up on aban­doned carts more often

Redesign­ing a web­site can take between 1.5 and 3 months, depend­ing on how com­plex the project is. As a web­site own­er, most of your time will be spent col­lab­o­rat­ing with con­trac­tors and approv­ing their designs and drafts.

Top tip: cre­ate a list of pri­or­i­ties for your web­site. If your blog con­tent is already pret­ty good, but you’ve got extreme­ly poor UX, there’s no use putting more mon­ey into blog­ging efforts. Since a web­site relaunch can become such a large project, it’s essen­tial that you fix the biggest prob­lems first.

Step 3: the “after” phase

Even after you’ve relaunched your web­site, there’s still the “after” phase. After launch­ing a site (or con­duct­ing any CRO, in fact), busi­ness­es need to car­ry out test­ing. There are two kinds of test­ing you’ll need to con­duct. Pre and post launch tests:

Pre-launch tests:

Respon­sive­ness

• Per­form A/B tests on a range of devices to see whether design changes are respon­sive to dif­fer­ent-sized screens
• Test your web­site’s per­for­mance across a range of browsers and check that text and image res­o­lu­tions, load­ing speed, and design ele­ments are con­sis­tent across them

Usabil­i­ty

• Check that all pages are easy and con­ve­nient to use and understand
• Ensure that impor­tant infor­ma­tion is acces­si­ble from all webpages
• Con­duct a con­tent check, look­ing for gram­mar and spelling mistakes
• Check that all com­pa­ny and prod­uct infor­ma­tion is correct
• Ver­i­fy that the design choic­es are func­tion­al and that they don’t hin­der the use of the site
• Ensure images are placed prop­er­ly and sized correctly

Links

• Test redi­rects to ensure they’re func­tion­ing as they should
• Check that out­bound and inter­nal links are func­tion­ing properly
• Check that Google Search Con­sole isn’t flag­ging any bro­ken links

HTML/CSS val­i­da­tion

• Check that the site is actu­al­ly avail­able to search engines
• Ensure that you have accu­rate sitemaps in both HTML and XML formats
• Ensure there are no HTML syn­tax errors

Post-launch tests:

KPIs

• Mon­i­tor the same KPIs that you marked out in the begin­ning to see whether your changes have had a pos­i­tive effect

SEO

• Mon­i­tor your SEO per­for­mance over the first three months post-launch

Why you should continually monitor and improve your conversion rate

If you’re won­der­ing what to do after relaunch­ing a web­site, it’s not too dif­fer­ent from what you’ve been doing – but it’s a lot less intense.

Just because you’ve relaunched your web­site, it does­n’t mean that your work is done. A com­mon mis­take among web­site own­ers is for­get­ting that CRO is a con­tin­u­ous process.

You will have learned from your relaunch that it’s a lot of work. All that design­ing and devel­op­ing drains com­pa­ny resources, funds, and time. So, mov­ing for­ward, it’s impor­tant that you con­tin­u­al­ly mon­i­tor and improve your con­ver­sion rate rather than occasionally.

You can do this by con­tin­u­ous­ly test­ing ele­ments of your site and intro­duc­ing new fea­tures, styles, but­tons, and mar­ket­ing meth­ods. Where there are sig­nif­i­cant results, make changes! And where you see big dips, take action. This way, you won’t have to exhaust your resources on one large project.

Success story: How Wasp Barcode improved conversions by 250%

Wasp Bar­code is a com­pa­ny that sells inven­to­ry and asset man­age­ment soft­ware B2B. The busi­ness own­ers want­ed to see an increase in the num­ber of demo requests they received since their sales team were already high­ly capa­ble of turn­ing these demo requests into com­plet­ed purchases.

Wasp Bar­code decid­ed to com­plete­ly redesign its web­site with the val­ues of cred­i­bil­i­ty and author­i­ty in mind.

The project was a suc­cess, and in six months, Wasp Bar­code saw an increase of 250% in demo request con­ver­sions.

Final thoughts

If you’d like to see an improve­ment in your web­site’s con­ver­sion rate, don’t hes­i­tate to get in touch with our team. pur­ple­plan­et offers a range of ser­vices that can help.

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