Is your website struggling to convert? – Here’s 4 possible reasons why

The best way to measure how successful your site is to look at your conversion rate. At the end of the day this is the most important statistic you have at your disposal when trying to decide if your site is a success.. Whilst it’s true that having as much traffic as possible is of…

Website Conversions

The best way to measure how successful your site is to look at your conversion rate.

At the end of the day this is the most important statistic you have at your disposal when trying to decide if your site is a success..

Whilst it’s true that having as much traffic as possible is of course important, ultimately if you are not converting this traffic then what is the point?

The bottom-line is that the only traffic which truly matters are those who actually purchase your product or service, all other traffic is practically considered useless to helping your businesses profits and success as they have not been converted to spend money.

It’s vital that to judge success that you know and are aware of your traffic and conversion rates, the best way to measure this is to use a program like google analytics.

Generally a good conversion rate by industry standards would be considered between 2% – 3%. This rate can fluctuate depending on the value of the product or service being purchased. (e.g. you’d have more difficulty converting customers if you’re selling products or services that are very expensive compared to ones which are very cheap).

If you see that you have been getting a lot of traffic but the majority of it is not being converted then there may be a few particular reasons at play. Here are four common ones which could be causing this:

Your site speed is slow

If your site speed is slow people will get frustrated and leave, obviously since they have left they are lost and can no longer be converted. Also since they have had a bad user experience the chances of them coming back to visit are slim to none, this can be detrimental to your site as it’s very hard to ever recover these lost possible conversions. It’s vital that your site is fast and makes a positive first impression!

Some of the many issues that can cause your site to be slow are things such as:

  • Not being optimized for mobile
  • Broken links
  • Not optimizing your images
  • Poor or messy code
  • Not enabling the caching capability on the site

The biggest factor in many people’s opinion which causes slow speed is actually having poor hosting. To view our own excellent hosting packages please contact 2Cubed here.

Not using Call to Action effectively or at all

You have to make it as easy as possible for customers to purchase your product/service, they should never have to go searching to get to the stage where they can purchase which would make them a conversion for you.

Your calls to action need to be clear, easy to see and enticing to get the customer to click. Always make sure your users have at their disposal access to all the info they need before they make a decision to purchase, if they have to search for this content you will have users who drop out and you will miss out on possible conversions you otherwise could have had.

Where necessary you should make sure that there are relevant calls to action available on your most important pages on the site. Make sure to give these calls to action a prominent position on the page so that they stick out to the user.

Bottom-line is simple just make sure it is very easy for the user to convert when they are ready and willing to.

Poor Mobile Experience

As you should already be aware the use of mobiles to view sites is increasing each year. So it is absolutely imperative that your website is mobile friendly! If it’s not you have severely hampered your chances of success and in turn decreased your conversion rate and honestly you may not recover from it unless you rectify the issue, it’s simply that important and as our reliance on mobile technology increases this is only going to become more and more important in the future.

You must make sure your website has been designed specifically for mobile compatibility and not just that it is simply responsive.

A few key things that can be done to make sure your website is designed for mobile are things such as:

  • Using large and easily legible text
  • Using concise and short paragraphs
  • Making sure that every key feature is just a tap away
  • Having just a single call-to-action on pages

Make sure to regularly review your site’s mobile compatibility especially as you add new content to the site.

User experience is frustrating

Another vital issue that can be causing you not to capitalize on conversion opportunities is that you are offering the users who visit your site a poor of frustrating user experience. The best way to find out what is making your user experience frustrating is by asking the users themselves, note feedback and complaints! A few common annoyances that can contribute to a poor user experience are thing such as:

  • Navigation is a chore
  • Too many ads/pop-ups
  • Your site simply doesn’t look good (UX Design is poor)
  • Your site does not give the users the information they need

These issues can be fixed easily and it is important that they are.

When using analytics you should always pay close attention to your bounce rate. This is a key indicator of how good or bad your user experience is. If it is high, then you know there is something that is not appealing to users and needs to be fixed, if its low it means users are generally happy with your site as they are spending time on it.

There are many different possible reasons why your site may not be converting but those mentioned in this article are issues that would apply to all.

By making these changes if you haven’t already you should see a big difference and improvement in your conversion rates and your sites success.

For more advice and information on having a successful website get in touch with 2Cubed today!