Imagine entering a store where there are literal barricades placed between the aisles with mile-long queues in front of an enraged cashier — that’s how poor site UX looks like in real life. With a setup like that, it’s no wonder people go to the brand next door!

Instead, what you should be doing is streamlining the payment process to the extent of making it dead-easy for your customers to conduct a purchase. This will not only make your customers happier, and their transactions faster, but it’ll also do wonders to your overall conversion rates. Yet, how exactly do you do all of this? Check the tips below and find out!

Smart Use of CTAs

Boosting traffic towards your site is never a bad thing, per se. Nevertheless, this is where a lot of brands fail; you don’t want traffic just for traffic’s sake — you want to convert! According to Statista, the average cart abandonment rate was around 80% last year! That’s exactly why you need some smart CTA (call to action) placements to entice your customers to make that final step and complete their purchase. For instance, “try for free,” “join now,” “click here,” and so on and so forth.

Place these at key points on your website and don’t jumble them all together; you want your CTAs to be clear and emphasized. Also, be sure to use contrasting colours to really make them stick out; transparent CTAs are harder to notice. In addition, use timers and inventory counters with your CTAs to elicit a sense of urgency and scarcity.

Performance Optimization

There’s nothing worse than a slow-loading page. This will drive your customers away from your website like a plague. Unless you want to punish your visitors for some reason, you need to accelerate the loading speed of your webpage.

Start by optimizing the most important pages; these include your homepage, landing pages, product pages, contact and about pages, and so on. Now, what you generally want to do is compress all your images and resize them to more appropriate formats to save on space; limit redirects (no more than 3 in a chain); enable browser caching; and so on.

If you aren’t exactly sure how you’re supposed to do all of this, consider consulting with an experienced digital creative agency to find a custom-fit solution for your needs.

Use Proper Tools and Metrics

Now, in order to check how well your CTAs — and your overall web design — are doing, you need to use some smart tools and metrics. For instance, some heatmap and scrolltracking tools — such as Hotjar and Crazy Egg — to get a neat visual representation of your website’s main hotspots. With these, you can track almost anything, starting from your viewers’ mouse movements to scrolls and clicks all displayed in shades of red and blue (hot–cold).

In addition, you can use Google Analytics to check other vital site metrics such as your user’s average dwell time, bounce rates, and most importantly of all — your conversion rates. That way you’ll know if your site’s UX is heading in the right direction.

Add Video Content

Exceptional visuals have always been an integral part of the user experience — now even more so. According to Forbes, having embedded videos on your landing page increases conversion rates by 80%. What’s more, 90% of surveyees said that video content helps them finalize their purchasing decisions.

Now, this does not necessarily imply that they want to see any old, low-quality garbage — you still have to create entertaining, high-quality video content. If you don’t possess the skills to do so, hire a professional designer to do it for you. That way you’ll make sure that you’re only posting top quality content, preventing your brand from becoming a meme on the Internet.

Give a FAQ

High-quality customer service is the Holy Grail of UX. Many a brand has tried improving particularly this part of their business and failed. The reason — they didn’t go the extra mile for their customers.

Answering your customers’ questions and helping them resolve their issues is commendable, but what you really ought to be doing is creating video guides and demos before the need arises. That way people will turn to your brand by default when they’re in need of assistance. Post extensive FAQs, upload helpful guides and manuals, and become known as the brand people can trust. This will create a “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” effect where they’ll repay the favour with their continued loyalty.

As long as you work on continually optimizing your UX strategy, you have nothing to worry about. Follow the latest UX trends and keep yourself updated with what does and doesn’t work. Remove the barricades and let the customers pour inside.