Why spend hours and thousands of dollars redesigning your website from scratch when someone has already done the work for you?
Millions of businesses turn to website templates to make the design process more efficient. But there’s something almost no one is talking about and it’s a big problem.
Website templates are not optimized for conversions.
What’s user experience (UX) got to do with conversions? Everything.
There’s no denying that your homepage is vital to your site, especially if you’re a SaaS company. It’s likely one of your most visited pages, acting as a proverbial launch pad.
While you read about optimizing individual landing pages day in and day out, optimizing homepages is less frequently explored. Do the same old rules from 2010 still apply? Are people still visiting and using homepages they same way they were a decade ago?
Several years ago, Jeremy Smith wrote, “Traditional optimization is dead, and in its place is arising a brave new world of mobile conversion optimization.”
I have to disagree. Is mobile conversion optimization a “brave new world”? Yes. Is traditional optimization “dead”? Not by a long shot.
Traditional (i.e. web) optimization and mobile optimization are two separate practices, requiring two separate strategies. One is not replacing the other. Instead, optimizers must learn to master both.
Ever wonder why your site has a lot of visitors but not enough transactions, purchases, or inquiries? In this post, we look at marketing and UX metrics from a slightly different angle.
Have you ever forgotten a password for a site? What about a security question?
Have you ever spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to think of a password you can remember, but also complies with a list of arbitrary requirements (e.g., seven uppercase letters, four special characters, etc.)?
When these UX problems pop up, they cause friction.
Friction that prevents new SaaS customers from signing up, friction that prevents loyal eCommerce customers from creating an account for next time, friction that prevents current customers from accessing their accounts.
In 1999, David Weinberger, a technologist and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, wrote, “Personalization: the automatic tailoring of sites and messages to the individuals viewing them so that we can feel that somewhere there’s a piece of software that loves us for who we are.”
Two decades later, ironically, personalization is being used by companies attempting to make the online experience more human.
Personalization has grown rapidly since David’s statement. So much so that personalized experiences have become the norm, not an option. [Tweet it!]
Often, marketing creativity encounters technical limitations. A web page can load only so fast. UX is constrained by browsers. Cutting-edge solutions are accessible only to those with large budgets.
Every once in a while a big debate comes along in the conversion optimization industry. There was the carousel debate, the hamburger menu debate, the above the fold debate, etc.
Optimizers have been debating another question: Which mobile design is best for optimizers?
Is it m(Dot) design, responsive design, or adaptive design? All three options have their unique pros and cons as far as UX and SEO go, but which is most suitable for someone running experiments and tests on the regular?
Animation for the sake of “cool” can often hurt conversions since it’s distracting, but not always. There are four ways animation, when used properly, can actually strengthen user experience. And better user experience can lead to higher conversions.
You don’t need to overhaul your site to take advantage of animation. Just about any site can utilize basic animation in its loading sequence, calls-to-action, or navigation.