Experts Reveal: The Top 5 Things Every Business Should Be Testing On Their Website

Experts Reveal: The Top 5 Things Every Business Should Be Testing On Their Website

By Mark Hawkshaw-Burn

Purple Fruit like to call conversion rate optimisation as CRO, and just like with anything, your CRO campaign should always start with thorough research to identify areas of much needed improvement on your website. However, we understand that sometimes it isn’t always achievable to go into this much depth and that sometimes, people may need to take a more instinctive approach. So just to narrow it down, here are the top 5 most important things to take a look at on your site.

1. Carousels

This is one of the clients favourites due to the fact that carousels are able to gather vast amounts of information into such a small amount of space. However, user testing results have shown that visitors tend to get distracted easily with too many illustrations and animations, which tend to have a negative impact on conversion rates.

If you’re still not convinced, perhaps the findings from Nielsen Norman Group, the Gods of usability studies can persuade you. From their results, it was found that users find carousels rather annoying and tend to pretend that they are not there at all.

If you’re still unsure on having just the one banner to replace your carousel, why not head for a banner that includes links to organise your site into sections. Lots of websites do this well for example, River Island and ASOS both have separate links for women and men clothes sections. Many clients make the common mistake of overloading their site with 8 or 10 different banners, with none that will never be clicked on.

2. Videos

Videos work fantastically well as they are able to cover large amounts of texts and images into a form that’s visually appealing and entertaining on the eye.

Replace paragraphs of texts and large spaces of images and animations with a video instead. Videos are in particularly effective for those of you who want to explain a product or service that is quite in depth or difficult to explain.

Studies have shown that visitors are more likely to watch a video than read through pages and pages of texts. However, this can not be generalised to all customers and all websites as each website is different and is positioned in a different industry and market. Nothing is ever guaranteed just like the video is not guaranteed to work which is why you should always test it out first.

3. Reviews and client testimonials

If you are looking for your customers to make a purchase on your website, youre going to have to make your website appear as professional and reliable as possible so that you can gain their trust and payment. People are very careful about handing over their payment details online, especially if it’s to a company they have never heard of before. By adding some customer reviews and testimonials, you will be able to influence trust in your brand.

However, if you think that by just dropping in a quick made up and overly obvious and cheesy testimonial/review you will automatically gain the user’s trust; you are wrong. There is a way to do it; you need to ensure they are believable. If you simply praise your company then your reader will automatically think that they have been written by yourself. By adding pictures of the reviewers this will help to display reliability even further. If you look on our Purple Fruit home page you will be able to see our genuine customer testimonials that are accompanied with their picture and job title.

4. Forms

This is probably the most important part in pulling the potential customer in. You need to ensure you get this part spot on, any mistake made you could risk losing the sale altogether.

There are many great tools available that can help track what your visitors are doing on your forms. For example, you can see where customers struggle to fill in information or where they give up. This can all help you in improving your forms and making them more user friendly.

5. Long Content  VS Short Content

Still to this day nobody really knows for sure whether people read or don’t read lots of information online. However, what we can be certain of is that the debate has been going on for years and years. Unfortunately there is no straight correct answer.

Many of our clients have suggested that longer content helps whilst others have suggested that less content is more effective. However, it really does depend on what you are writing about. For example, products and services that are difficult to understand and are complex will need to be fully explain using vast amounts of content. On the other hand, products that are simple such as childrens toys or jewellery will require a lot less. If you’re not sure about how much content you should be including on your product or service, remember to always test first!

Want To Know More?

Why not drop us an Email today to ask us about our CRO services and get the top tips on how the Purple Fruit geeks really master it.

If you are looking to brush up on your digital marketing skills, why not check out the “Learn” section on our website and be the master of your own digital destiny. Click here to check it out.

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Thanks!

Mark