Four common conversion roadblocks (and how to overcome them)

So your analytics are telling a powerful story: your website is drawing in visitors, but not as many are turning into paying customers as you’d like. They’re browsing, but not buying. They’re filling the cart, but closing the tab before hitting ‘purchase’. It’s a common concern, and calls for some troubleshooting.

It’s important to focus on users rather than revenue. Users who visit your website are looking for you to solve their problem—and solve it quickly.

There’s no way to say this gently, but the truth is, they probably don’t care about your brand (depending, of course, on what you sell, and how compelling your brand identity is to their sense of self).

Plenty of tools can help measure user behaviour on your website, but before you invest in the research, make sure you’ve ticked a few basic boxes.

1. Perceived load time

Is your website visibly slow? Run it through Google PageSpeed, then follow the recommendations to resolve any delays. Remember—it’s important to differentiate actual load time from ‘perceived load time’.

2. Distractions

Do you have annoying pop-ups or slide-outs throughout the customer journey? Get rid of them. At best, they’re distracting; at worst, they’ll frustrate your customer enough to drive them away.

3. Information overload

Studies have shown that, on average, users read as little as 20% of a page’s content. In addition to minimising the amount of copy, web pages should be laid out in a way that makes the content easily scannable, allowing users to quickly find what they are looking for. Consider subheadings, call-out text, pull quotes, and paragraph breaks—and look for any unnecessary repetition.

4. Lack of clarity

Like Don Miller said—“People don’t buy the best products; they buy the products they can understand the fastest.” (We all know the quote, right? Right, guys?) New users need to know what you offer and how it will improve their lives within the first five seconds. Ensure you communicate in a clear, straightforward and customer-focused way.

get in touch to learn more about how to optimise your store’s conversion rate.