We talk all the time here about how your website should be your most valuable employee. It’s the only part of your organization that is always available to potential clients. If all you have is a digital brochure that collects virtual internet dust, you miss the point. It should generate leads for your business and promote you, even while you sleep. Have you thought, however, about the actual design and how that can affect your bottom line? (That rhymed… am I the only one who notices that stuff?) The design of your website makes a difference in so many ways. Let’s break down some ways to drive sales with your website design.

How to Drive Sales with Your Website Design

1. Use Simple, Clean Design

How many times have you visited a website that was so busy that you couldn’t cut through the chaos to find what you needed? I’ve seen this time and time again, particularly on people’s homepages. What are your goals for your website? What action do you want people to take as a result of visiting your website? Feature those items front and center. Everything else can live elsewhere on your site. It’s ok not to fill every bit of space on your homepage. When it comes to website design, white space is your friend.

You don’t want to bury your main goals behind the latest news, social media feeds, new employees, and other extraneous information. That’s not to say those things aren’t important, and they do have a place somewhere on your site, but stuffing everything on your homepage makes it busy and unattractive. In fact, 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive. That’s more than anyone can afford to lose.

2. Make Sure Your Design is Mobile Friendly

You’d be surprised how many websites still don’t have a mobile version. Since mobile devices account for nearly 2 of every 3 minutes spent online, not having a mobile version of your website means all that traffic slips through your fingers. Nobody wants to zoom way in to get basic information from your website.

3. Use Clear Calls to Action

The next way to drive sales with your website design is to use clear calls to action. Hubspot defines a call to action as part of a website, advertisement, or landing page that encourages the visitor to do something. This is where your goals play a major part. If one of your goals states that you want more subscribers, there should be clear places where site visitors can click to perform that action. Calls to action should involve verbs stating exactly what you want the visitor to do. Here are some examples:

• Get Started
• Subscribe Now
• Get a Free Trial
• Learn More
• Sign Up

You get the idea. Notice that each of these starts with a verb. You should place these strategically on pages near the relevant information, usually in the form of a button.

4. Drive Sales with Your Website Design by Strategically Placing Testimonials

A lot of websites feature testimonials on their own dedicated page. As we’ve discussed before, nobody really reads those. Testimonials have a much higher impact when strategically “sprinkled” around your website.

Consider placing a powerful testimonial near a call to action to show the site visitor WHY they should perform that action. They work great on landing pages and product pages, as well. The main thing to remember is that the testimonial should work hand in hand with your content so that one amplifies the other.

5. Speed Up Your Site

While it may not directly relate to the design of your website, the speed of your site directly affects the revenue you see from it. A whopping 39% of people stop engaging with a website if images or other content take too long to load. While I could write a whole post on site speed, one of the leading SEO experts, Neil Patel, has a fantastic post with tips to speed up your site.

6. Make Your Contact Info Easy to Find

Listen… burying your contact information is one of the worst things to do if you’re trying to drive sales with your website design. At the very least, you should have a “contact us” page in your main navigation where people can easily find your phone number, email address, physical address, and/or a form to fill out to request more information. Even better, put your contact info in your footer so it appears on every page. Places with a physical location or where people need to call to make an appointment should feature contact information prominently on the homepage. Bottom line? You can’t make sales if people can’t get in touch with you.

If you want people to engage with your website, and consequently with you, it’s imperative that you design your site in a way that makes it easy to do that. If you think your site design could use some work, use the form below to check out our free website review tool… it’s a great checklist that allows you to look at your site objectively and decide what you’d like to change. So use that website design to increase your bottom line, and keep swimming along!