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Designing For Conversions: Guide, Examples & Best Practice
That means your design needs to connect with visitors the moment they hit your page. This doesn’t mean you should just cut all your form fields though. The info you’re collecting can be valuable for qualifying leads and getting to know more about what problems they’re trying to solve. Trim the fat where you can, but keep any must-have form fields you can’t afford to lose. That being said, there are some simple design improvements you can make to reduce friction and ensure visitors have a better experience. Add in branded elements—like illustrations, colors, or shapes—to help frame each customer quote and align it with the rest of your design.
It’s not just a stylistic choice — it’s a strategic one. In the second example below, the directional cue is more subtle but still very clear. Your attention is first driven to the top right brush, which is pointing almost exactly at the Shop Now button. In the first example below, the woman is looking at the screen, which is coincidentally in the same direction as the button to start a Pro trial for free.
And it’s highlighted as soon as the user hovers over the ‘Get OptinMonster Now’ button. The whole page amounts to a hero image, headline, and email form, prompting visitors to register for a chance to win a limited edition chair. There are no listed benefits, no competitive differentiators. (Presumably Extreme Lounging has done some of that legwork before people hit this page.) Here, it’s all about building leads. On desktop, this landing page includes videos and GIFs—elements that have been shown to increase visitor engagement and help drive conversions. On mobile, though, we get a stripped-down version that maintains the visual appeal of its big brother while also ensuring lightning-fast load times on cellular connections.
It’s the visual equivalent of a pause that lets your CTA sink in. The answer lies in leveraging psychological triggers and design elements that focus attention and encourage interaction. Server-side testing capabilities will let you run tests deep within your tech stack and fix even the most complex UI and functionality issues with ease.
Make sure you source a high-resolution photograph where you can clearly see the face of your customer. Don’t crop your image in too close though—researchers have found that extreme close-ups tend to make the subject look less competent and trustworthy. Pull it back so you can see their shoulders, and leave room at the top so you get a full view, like in this example from a Thinkific landing page. Use a Well-Framed Headshot – A headshot photo is your first point of evidence that this review comes from a real person.
When conversion rates are optimized, revenue becomes more predictable. This directly supports more accurate sales forecasting and better budget planning. This guide outlines how to improve your conversion rate optimization strategy, along with a downloadable conversion optimization planner designed to drive measurable results. Yet, on average, only 1.7% of website visitors across all industries convert, leaving the vast majority of potential revenue untapped. This gap represents not just lost sales but also wasted marketing spend, as acquiring traffic can be costly. Make your website work smarter not harder, and generate more qualified leads and customers with conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Through heatmaps and funnel analysis, you see that visitors frequently abandon the appointment booking process where they have to fill out a lengthy form with detailed medical history. Cocohanee, an Indonesian retail company, observed that many mobile visitors clicked on the hamburger menu icon, but their engagement with the menu was low. To address this, they created a variation where sub-categories were displayed upfront to encourage more visits to the listings page. The test ran for 22 days, causing a 4% increase in listing page visits and a 29% increase in transactions. Urgency and scarcity messaging are no less important to motivate visitors to take immediate action instead of delaying it. While scarcity implies limited supply, urgency means limited time.
I don’t have to find a new plugin to deal with the issue. I also really enjoy the leads plugin so I can see what’s going on with my subscriptions. Thrive University is our online education platform where you’ll find a whole library of courses http://vocal.media/journal/how-marketing-teams-lose-brand-consistency-across-channels-and-what-perfogro-limited-does-about-it-dsbr90vsg/ to help you navigate the online business world and it’s included in Thrive Suite.
It’s not because they lack appeal, but because they’re not strategically designed to convert visitors into customers. If you’re investing heavily in driving traffic without optimizing for conversions, you’re letting valuable opportunities slip away. To effectively implement conversion-centered design strategies, focus on the critical elements that drive user action. Clear and compelling calls-to-action should be strategically placed and designed to grab attention, while content must be tailored to address user pain points and highlight benefits.
How To Optimize Landing Pages
Landing pages have the highest average conversion rate at 23% among all signup forms because they are designed specifically for single conversion actions. Pricing pages are critical CRO opportunities where A/B testing pricing intervals, product features, and form placement can significantly impact conversion rates. CRO and SEO work together by aligning search intent with conversion-focused content, using SEO to drive qualified traffic and CRO to convert that traffic into leads and revenue. A high conversion rate means your website is well-designed, formatted effectively, and appealing to your target audience. A low conversion rate could result from a variety of factors related to website performance or design. A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, like completing a web form, signing up for a service, or purchasing a product.
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You can add countdown timers and ribbons to your site, show them to everyone or only specific people and boost your sales like never before. All of this and more becomes reality when you start using quiz funnels in your online business. Once you have your website, it’s time to create landing pages and funnels.
It works by tracking visitors to the website and serving them online ads as they visit other sites around the web. Elements like color, trust signals, urgency, and social proof can significantly influence conversions. A good conversion rate typically ranges between 2% to 5%, but high-performing websites can achieve 10% or more depending on industry, audience targeting, and optimization strategies.
Hopefully, you’ve learned a thing or two and you’re well on your way to changing some of your design to boost your conversion rate. In this case, it’s a matter of – if your landing page looks good (which is the first thing your visitors make a subconscious guess on), it’s more likely to have a higher conversion rate. This is another case of your web design helping you boost your conversion rate through indirect conversion principles. Your website shouldn’t be “just” beautiful, it should be building trust through clever web design elements you’re about to read below. Since users might be used to certain elements to be a certain color (e.g.CTA buttons are usually always green).
Anyone who has run a lot of experiments on websites knows this all too well, because you don’t have to run that many tests before the results start shocking you to the core. The things that seem like no-brainers can and will have a really negative impact. Show an order summary along with a picture of the chosen product. Include links to continue shopping and options of recommended bundles. But in the midst of everything, make sure the CTA to proceed to checkout is more prominent to nudge visitors in the main direction. If they are in shambles, your site visitors will be confused and feel discouraged to complete the goal for which they landed on your website.
HubSpot includes a winning metric dropdown that helps identify which variation performs best. The available metrics include open rate, click rate, and click-through rate, that allow teams to evaluate what drives the strongest engagement and conversions. A CRO strategy is designed to convert more of your visitors into paying customers. It keeps Claude focused, the output accurate, and the code easy to review. Trying to build the whole page in one prompt is how you get a mess you cannot trust.
- “We tested many different CTAs, and we found one that worked and got a massive click-through rate.” Hey, landing page best practices never hurt, either.
- Enhance your website’s success with proven conversion‑centered design tips.
- This isn’t true in every case, but it’s strong evidence that having one goal on your page will make visitors more likely to act.
- This tool has been really effective for my e-commerce business.
This example from Unbounce customer Packlane perfectly integrates their brand style and carries that through into the design of the testimonial itself. Feature Multiple Testimonials – One testimonial can sometimes be powerful enough to persuade visitors. But if this is the first time someone is interacting with your brand, you can bring even more trust to the table by including a collection of reviews on the page. In social psychology, this is because of something called the bandwagon effect.
Its suite of products comprises session replays, heatmaps, journey mapping, funnels and conversions, and many more. The tool doesn’t have its own A/B testing capability but integrations with third-party testing tools enable you to leverage insights to run tests for more conversions. With over 50% of web visits now coming from mobile, it is crucial to design for conversions specifically on mobile devices. This means using a simple layout and concise copy to capture and retain visitors’ attention to your landing page. It is an unexpected twist, but trust me, they are necessary inclusions for a website design for conversion optimization.
I give Claude one section image at a time and ask it to study the image closely and rebuild it as code that matches. I lock the visual design first as images, where iterating is instant and cheap. Only once a section looks right do I hand it to Claude to turn into real, clean HTML and CSS that matches the image as closely as possible. We conduct continuous testing, including usability checks and A/B experiments, to identify gaps. This ensures your website performs efficiently and delivers maximum possible conversions consistently. Build confidence through testimonials, reviews, ratings, certifications, and social proof.
The normal inbound rules still apply — well-crafted copy, engaging visuals, and a compelling offer are required for ads to work. This approach is especially effective in CRO when retargeting visitors who engaged with the website’s highest-converting pages. If you let it improvise too early, you lose the design you approved. I design each section, iterate until it is right, and save each one as its own image. By the end I have a folder of clean section images that together tell the full story of the page, top to bottom. ● Choose pages that convert, not just pages that win design awards.
As directional cues, arrows are about as subtle as a punch in the face, which is why they work so well. With so little time on your page, visually guiding the user to the intended focal point is a smart move. Another important consideration is the contrasting effect of color. This idea borrows from white space and contrast techniques in that it’s a method of isolation via difference.
Finally, to complete the triangular shape around the main conversion button, the third brush is a high-contrast position, pointing directly towards the Goby logo. The awesome example below shows four different cues at once. One arrow is more aggressive, while another goes in both directions. There’s also two signs pointing in the direction of the header, subtly leading people towards key features. I love it because it’s so free-flowing and direct at the same time.
Now I bring my favorite reference into ChatGPT and use its image generation (Image 2.0) to design the hero section first. The hero sets the tone for everything, so I get it right before moving on. The trick is to stop asking for the whole thing at once. First you decide exactly what it looks like, in pixels, fast. Then you translate that look into real code, precisely, one section at a time.