What do you want people to do when they land on your website? Do you want them to fill out a form, download an e-book, or make a purchase? Whatever the desired action is, the number of people who view your site versus those who complete that action is known as the conversion rate.

Your website design will highly affect your conversion rate. It is prudent to optimize your website if you're looking to up your conversion rate. The good thing is that you don't need to spend any additional money to do this.

Here are 9 quick ways you can improve your website and increase your conversion rate.

1) Clean web design

At the beginning of the internet era, websites had to have fancy Flash videos and quirky visual flares. However, those days are long gone. In recent years, a clean web design is seen as desirable.

Functions on your website should be easy to spot, and a visitor should not feel overwhelmed and stuck at any point. Your website should provide a positive user experience and should offer a seamless customer journey that converts.

2) Have a Single Column Layout for Your Website

A one-column format is what you should have on your website. It looks clean and has extra white space that makes it easy for the user to consume.

It's also less distracting, and your website visitor can eye down the page with ease. Overall, it improves the user experience and increases conversion rate. Therefore, design your page to have a single-column layout.

3) Optimize Your Landing Page

Landing page optimization (LPO) involves improving the elements on a website's targeted pages to increase its conversion rate. When optimizing the landing page, you will first need to optimize the different traffic sources to your landing page. From there, you can experiment with the on-page elements.

One element you can start working on is limiting the number of actions on the landing page. Begin by removing unnecessary website navigation elements, extra form fields, or any other redundant functionality.

Also, reduce the landing page loading speed; the faster your landing page loads, the lower the bounce rate. Conversely, the slower the loading speed, the higher the bounce rate. Finally, optimize your SEO on your landing page to make it easy for search engines to send organic traffic to your page.

4) Use Visuals and Video for Your Website

Writing appealing blog posts for your website is a good way to delight and engage visitors. You can combine this with visuals and videos. Consumers have become more visual and want to see images, infographics, screenshots, and videos as it's more entertaining than words alone.

Therefore, be sure to use more visuals and videos for your website. You will find visitors engaging more with your content, and they are much more likely to share it on their social media. If you're in a technical niche, you can also use more visuals and videos to explain technical details for easy understanding.

5) Add Social Proof

Social proof is the psychological phenomenon that people copy the actions of others, especially when they're not sure what to do in a particular situation.

For example, imagine you're new in an area, and you're looking to have lunch. However, you don't know the best restaurants to eat in. What would you do?

If you're like most people, you'll most probably look for a restaurant with a line. Why? The queue is social proof (a vote of confidence) that the restaurant has good food. So, you assure yourself that you're going to like it as well.

When you want to increase your website's conversion rate, it's no different. Visitors will look for social proof to see if they can trust doing business with you. In the online business, they will look for testimonials and reviews.

You can start by asking your happy customers to review your business and post them on your website. Make sure they're real customers who have made a purchase on your business, not bots. It'll hurt your business if the reviews are stage-managed.

According to BrightLocal, 87% of consumers read online reviews of local businesses. Also, before a consumer engages with any business entity, they will have checked them out on 2-3 review sites. So, make sure you add social proof.

6) Add Trust Badges to Your Website

Just like social proof, a trust badge inspires trust in your website visitor. By displaying a trust badge on your website, visitors to your website feel they are dealing with a legitimate business, and they can entrust their personal information to you.

A key trust signal you can include on your website is contact information. Provide a physical address, contact page, professional email, phone number, and live chat. Also, add your social media pages, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and Instagram, as they are trust badges in themselves.

7) Don't Force the Customer to Create an Account

If you're an online retailer, remove all the unnecessary steps for a consumer to complete their transaction. It's usually tempting to make a customer create an account with you to market to them and make shopping faster for them in the future. However, the hustle of creating an account is disruptive and complicated.

Therefore, make it optional for one to create an account when buying. You can highlight the benefits of opening an account, for example, being the first to know of promotions, deals, and exclusive content. However, do not make it compulsory to create an account.

8) Give a Guarantee

If you think from the perspective of the consumer, they're taking a risk buying your product. If the fear of risk is too big, this will stop a consumer from buying from you. To make sales, you need to take away this risk.

One of the easy ways to take away the risk is to offer a guarantee. A classic warranty would be 100% money back if the product does not live up to its expectation. When you offer a guarantee, give a 12-month money-back guarantee. It's less likely for people to claim them compared to a 30-day warranty. Although it sounds counterintuitive, it's true.

9) Chatbots

Consumers want easy and quick ways to get in touch with businesses. They don't want to keep calling and asking for help. They do not want to fill out an inquiry form and wait for someone to get in touch. They want answers now and more so want to control the conversation.

A chatbot will be well suited for this. A chatbot is a programmed live chat software that mimics a human voice or text response and interacts with website visitors to answer their questions. By setting up a chatbot, you can respond immediately to customer queries.

Give Your Website a Boost

Your website is your digital store. It's where potential customers come to see if they should give you their money. So, make sure you do not lose any of them by optimizing your website. With the above strategies, you will substantially increase your website conversion rate.

Conversion rate is just one of many elements you should keep track of when running a website. How are you leveraging headers and web design to impress users and win wallets?