Conversion Rate Optimisation: Common Reasons Your Website Isn't Converting

Today I want to talk about conversion rate optimisation and some of the most common reasons why your website isn't converting traffic into customers.

What Does Conversion Rate Mean?

Your conversion rate is the percentage of your website visitors that take a conversion action. They can convert by making a purchase, if you have an ecommerce business, or by doing something like filling out a booking form or calling your business if your site is focused on lead generation.

While increasing your website's conversion rate by 1%, say from 1% to 2%, might not sound like a lot, it will have a huge impact on the number of conversions you see.

If you are currently getting 2,000 monthly visitors and you have a conversion rate of 1%, that's 20 conversions per month. If you increase your conversion rate by just 1%, all of a sudden, you've doubled your conversions to 40 with the exact same amount of traffic.

Small incremental improvements over time can transform your business.

Slow Loading Times

The most common reason for people to abandon your website without converting are slow loading times.

You can test your site speed by page for free using Google's Pagespeed Insights tool.

There's a lot of information there, but what's really important is that your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should be less than 2 seconds.

Go through your website, especially your most frequently visited pages and the ones that people can convert on e.g. product pages and contact us pages. If any page is taking a noticeable amount of time to load, then you absolutely need to work on your site speed.

Confusing Navigation

Another common issue when it comes to conversion tracking is websites that have confusing navigation.

To test this out, send your website to a friend or relative who isn't very tech-savvy. Tell them some specific things you want them to do. If possible, you should screen-record their journey, you will be able to see the sticking points that they are having. You should ask them to give you honest feedback on what they found confusing.

If you have an ecommerce website, you could ask them to find a specific product and order it.

If you run a lead gen focused site like a plumber for example, you could ask them to go to the site and act as if they are trying to book someone to fix their sink.

Through that process, you should get a much better understanding of users' pain points with your site navigation that you can then use to improve the flow of your site for the user.

Too Many Touchpoints

The next common reason we see websites converting poorly is having too many touchpoints or asking for too much information from the user. 

The conversion process should be as seamless as possible for the user. The less work they have to do to convert the better. This is a much more common issue on lead generation sites. It's really common for businesses to ask for way too much information from potential customers at the form fillout stage.

You might really only need their name and phone number to get the ball rolling, but you might be asking for their name, phone number, email address, eircode, occupation and the issue they're facing. Everything beyond the name and phone number can be taken down on your first call with the customer once they have already given you their basic information.

While it is more common on lead gen sites, you can definitely speed up the process on ecommerce sites as well. Wherever possible, allow for Android and Apple Pay to speed up the checkout process. You would be surprised by how much it can help.

Lack Of Trust

The last conversion rate issue I will speak about today is lack of trust. If people don't trust your website, they're not going to convert. Would you hand over your personal information to a website you thought looked a bit dodgy?

Building trust on your website comes from a wide range of factors that include…

• How professional your website looks in terms of design and feel.
• How well-written the content on your website is.
• Lack of clear information about your business on the site.
• No testimonials from past customers to add social proof.

Anything that makes your website look unprofessional or lacking in credibility will cause users to leave your site without converting.

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Written by Christian Donovan, Director of Performance Marketing at 3B1.