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A Step By Step Guide To Improving Conversions On WordPress Website

By James Tredwell on September 10, 2019

How come I have so many visitors yet no conversions on my WordPress website?

Why does it take a lot of time for my visitors to convert into customers?

Why do my WordPress website visitors abandon the purchase in the middle of the process?

These are only some of the questions that WordPress administrators and online business owners keep asking, trying to improve conversion rate. The main problem while dealing with these questions is that there is no generic answer that will make us all happy in a couple of clicks. 

To be able to improve your online business performance, you have to investigate all its segments and be ready to work on them until you see improvements. 

But where to start this investigation? 

And what changes to introduce to make your website perform better?

Read on and find it out, because in this post we’re providing you with a practical guide that will help you:

  • Figure out your reasons for bad website performance;
  • Optimize for conversions with useful tips that cover all essential factors of your online business success.

Increase Website Conversion In Four Essential Steps

Step #1: WordPress Conversion Tracking

No matter what an internet guide or marketing guru say if you don’t analyze your WordPress conversion rates and performance, searching for precisely your pain points, you’ll never be able to boost conversions.

So, before starting to think about how to increase the conversion rate on a website, you should first ask yourself how to track them. 

Probably the best way of tracking your conversions and getting direct insight into your website performance is the use of Google Analytics. And here is what you should do.

1. Activate Google Analytics. To sign in to Google Analytics, all you need is your Gmail account. Once you’re there, visit the Administration section, go to Account, and click on the Create a new account. Once you type in the requested information, choose Get tracking ID to finish setting up your account.

2. Enable Google Analytics on your WordPress website. You can do this easily using one of the WordPress plugins developed for Google Analytics. All you have to do is install and activate the plugin of your choice and follow the setup instructions.

3. Make use of Google Analytics reports. Once the plugin is activated, Google Analytics will start providing you with different types of info important for your website. All the relevant data will be classified into five groups of reports that will help you keep track of them with minimal effort. These include Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behaviour, and Conversions Reports.

Having your accurate performance information compared to your goals and expectations, you’ll be able to conclude if your conversion rates fit your estimations, and if not, start to work on them. And this leads us to the following steps of the WordPress conversion-boosting process. 

Step #2: WordPress Website Speed Improvement

Did you know that 40% of people won’t wait more than 3 seconds for a website to load? So, if you’re facing this issue, consider decreasing your WordPress website loading time, as it may provide significant improvements in your website conversion. 

How to improve the speed of your website?

1. Stay away from suspicious low-cost hosting providers. 

While you may be tempted to choose cheaper website hosting, you should have in mind that in the long term it may become your biggest mistake. Provoking delays, bugs, and bottlenecks, cheap poor-quality hosting may cost you more than you expected. Not to mention the frustrations caused by poor or nonexistent technical support.

Instead of opting for suspicious hosting solutions, check out the deals offered by the leading hosting providers. They may seem to be more expensive in the short-term, but they frequently have special offers and discounts for new clients, while providing consistent, high-quality service in the long run.

2. Make sure to optimize the visual elements of your website.

Heavy and demanding images and videos may dramatically slow down your website. To make your that your visual identity is not keeping you from boosting conversions, you should check their properties and adjust them to provide the optimal experience. You can do this by:

  • Reducing the image size to fit the pixel dimensions in which it appears on the website;
  • Reducing image and video size using compression tools, which squeeze your images without impacting their quality.
  • Using advanced WordPress plugins to reduce the image size, deleting metadata, geotags, and other info that you don’t need.

3. Don’t overload the website with useless widgets and plugins. 

Useless widgets and plugins are those that you have installed, but you either don’t know how to use or, you don’t want to use. 

Apart from using your space, they may also get in conflicts with the plugins that you use and provoke major inconsistencies leading to serious loading delays and website breakdowns.

Besides, you may also want to check which of your active plugins jeopardize your website speed, by installing one of the WordPress plugins that can show you how each of the tools that you use behaves. Once you detect problematic plugins, you can change them for the ones with better performance.

Step #3: Creating Design That Will Improve Website Conversion

When it comes to the creation of conversion-friendly website designs, you should have in mind the four fundamentally essential features of a well-performing website.

1. The layout is sleek and minimalistic.

Instead of confusing your visitors with numerous sliders, banners, popups, and flashy animations, make sure to create a simple yet attractive website that will let them intuitively navigate towards your conversion area. 

Forget about distracting multiple-column content, lengthy drop-down menus, and other types of clickable content that may forget them what they are looking for. 

2. The design leads visitors to your call-to-action wherever on your website they are.

If you create a CTA button on a particular page, and then not feature it on the rest of your website, its performance probably won’t be as expected. In other words, it’s more than likely that a number of your website visitors won’t come directly to the page where your CTA is. Therefore, they won’t be able to react to it. However, that doesn’t mean that you are not supposed to guide them towards that page. 

So, instead of isolating it, try linking your CTA button on as many pages as possible, putting it into the context of those pages. You shouldn’t be pressuring visitors to click it but mentioning it may be pretty helpful in boosting conversions.

3. The number of CTA buttons is reduced to maximize the clicks on the essential CTA button.

Not only is a page full of CTA buttons visually unappealing, but it can also confuse your website visitors. And this will make them either instantly leave or navigate in the wrong direction, remaining unaware of your most important CTA. And this can be fatal for your WordPress conversion rate as it directly impacts both your click-through rate and user experience.

So, instead of making your website a crowded CTA button party, determine your website objective and create a single CTA that helps you reach that objective.

4. The website design is completely mobile friendly. 

And by this, we mean no unclickable buttons, frustratingly slow loading, enormous empty spaces, or excessive, unnecessary content that doesn’t help you make visitors convert. 

According to Our Code World, 57% of generated web traffic comes from mobile devices, so you may not want to risk all your potential conversions not investing in the mobile version of your website.

Besides, as Google gives priority to responsive websites in the search results, apart from letting down your visitors, a poorly developed website may also impact your general visibility and SEO ranking.

Step #4: Improve Communication on Your Website

Many online businesses fail to convert owed to a weak support system. Some of them don’t bother replying emails, some of them don’t even offer any support except call center number. And website visitors in the 21st century are not crazy about call centers and 30-minute wait time. So, what should you do to improve communication with your website visitors? 

1. Add live chat to WordPress.

Not only is a WordPress live chat plugin easy to install, but it is also the most affordable way to create an impeccable customer experience. And providing this outstanding customer service with live chat for WordPress, you will significantly grow your conversions, as live chat boost your conversion rate. 

This convenient support tool will improve your business position as it lets you:

  • Help your visitors 24/7, in real-time, both proactively and on-demand;
  • Identify customers’ needs quickly and recommend adequate products or services;
  • Create visitors’ profiles and save chat sessions to improve the quality of each interaction by eliminating visitors’ frustrations of repeating information;
  • Increase the chances of cross-selling and upselling;
  • Get valuable traffic insights, such as statistics about the most popular parts of your website based on your visitors’ navigation, etc. 

However, if you add live chat to WordPress, know that the tool itself won’t provide you with remarkable results unless you provide high-quality support. And this is done by training your live chat agents in different aspects, including the appropriate communication, your brand values, and the efficient use of a WordPress live chat plugin. 

2. Simplify email support. 

If you don’t feel ready to introduce live chat for WordPress, what you definitely can do to make your customers feel free to get in touch with you is feature your email support. By featuring email support, we’re thinking about two main tasks:

  • Make it more exposed so that visitors can quickly see how they can reach out to you.

Some website administrators place their contact info in a footer. In case of numerous websites, this means that customers can’t even see this info unless they scroll down to find it. And sometimes they won’t bother to do so.  So, you lose them. 

So, instead of hiding your email info who knows where on your website, make sure to make it easily visible from the beginning. Create a separate highlighted contact page, use a banner, or do anything else that will make the customers realize they can get in touch with you. Not only will your business seem more reliable, but you may also stop losing potential conversions just because of the unfortunate contact placement.

  • Use contact forms to simplify the process of sending an email.

Sometimes, visitors are too lazy to open a new tab, go to their mailbox, create a new email, type everything in, and then look for your email. Even listing it all out sounds a bit annoying. But with a little help from contact form plugins for WordPress (and there’s a diversity of them!), you may significantly simplify the emailing process. 

Practically speaking, all you have to do is create a perfect contact form from your WordPress plugin dashboard and place it wherever you want to. As soon as you activate it, your visitors can fill in their info (such as name, email, location, etc.), type in the message, and send you an email without even leaving your website. 

This way, not only are you saving their time, but you’re also keeping them on your website, which increases chances of new conversions.

3. Respond to comments and reviews

Keep in mind that high-quality website communication is not always about explicitly providing support. It’s also about keeping the customers engaged and interested in your content. 

So, no matter whether you have a review section, a forum, or a blog incorporated in your website, make sure to stay on top of them. Respond to reviews, engage in discussions, and react to their comments on your blog posts as this interaction will make them realize you care about their opinions.

Of course, not all website administrators are capable of dealing with every single comment that appears, but at least try to address negative reviews, to help improve visitors’ experience, as well as suggestions for improvement, as they may be extremely valuable for your business. 

Summing up: How To Boost Conversions On Your WordPress Website?

Like we’ve already said, no strategy can magically boost conversions on all kinds of websites. Each website has its strengths, and pain points and for yours to improve conversion rate, you should first thoroughly analyze its performance to figure out the problematic areas and try to fix them (WordPress conversion tracking included).

Next, make sure to speed up your website by choosing the right hosting, compressing visuals, and uninstalling plugins you don’t use. And besides, you should also take care of your visual identity. So, work on your design until it minimizes visitors’ potential frustrations, taking care of its layout and calls-to-action.

Finally, make your visitors stay on your website and increase the chances of conversions by:

  • using live chat for WordPress, 
  • creating convenient email contact forms, 
  • engaging with them on your review pages, forums, and blog posts. 

Not only will they feel appreciated, but you may also get a chance to create a tighter bond with them, which can only have a positive impact on your WordPress conversion.

Author Bio

David is customer support and project management expert who specializes in writing WordPress content. He does immense research and, as a result, writes in-depth blogs regarding any field. His works are regularly published in various papers and top-notch portals and can be seen on ProProfs.  

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