5 Pillars of a High-Converting Website

• The 3-Click Rule (as we like to call it) 

  This is a basic principle that needs to be carried through every area of your site. Every time a new page is built, a new product is loaded, a new category is added, you need to make sure that your customer can complete their purchase within 3 clicks.No matter which page they land on when arriving on your site, a potential customer must be able to journey from start to finish in no more than 3 clicks (fewer, if possible). They need to land on your website, see the product they were looking for, add to cart and proceed to checkout quickly and effortlessly.

• Mobile Friendly 

  Given that 67,2% of digital sales in 2019 were completed on mobile, we’re going to go ahead and say it’s pretty important to have a mobile responsive website…What this means is that every page of your website needs to be reviewed on desktop and mobile before you go Live with anything! You also need to make sure that your products view well on mobile, that your copy and fonts are big enough, and that your payment portal is easy to use and compatible on a phone.

• Data collection and tracking

Please, for the love of all things good and holy, please make sure that all of the tracking on your website is set up properly from the start. And that you are well equipped to collect data.Let’s break this down…Tracking refers to things like your Google Analytics, your pixels that integrate with Facebook ads, as well as your own basic understanding of how to track where a customer went on the site, what they browsed, how long they hung around for etc. You have to be able to track all of this data in order to continue to optimise your site as time goes on.

Data collection refers to the functionality of your site to collect people’s email addresses or phone numbers. There are a few common ways to do this – a standard “sign up and get 20% off” pop-up or similar tools. We would go so far as to say you should have at least 3 different and compelling reasons throughout your site for people to hand over their data.

The reason this is important is that we are going to go ahead and assume that you are spending a lot of time, money and energy on getting people to visit your website. If they visit and then leave without completing a purchase, you have more than likely lost them forever. Getting their email address, for example, means that you can keep them in a funnel and ultimately nurture them from the point of interest to the point of a paying customer.

Which brings us nicely around to pillar number 4…

• Abandon Cart Functionality
  
  Abandon cart recovery has a 10% conversion rate. That means that of the people who load up their shopping carts and then leave without checking out, 10% of them can be successfully brought back to complete their purchase by using a cart recovery email. So why wouldn’t you?On most eCommerce platforms (WooComerce, Shopify etc.), abandon cart functionalities are easy to install or add. And once it is set up, you have written your email, and you have scheduled the time at which it will deploy after cart abandonment, it will do the work for you.

• SEO Best Practice
  
  So SEO is a much bigger conversation – it requires a training session (or 6) all on it’s own. However, there are some basic SEO best practices that we suggest you implement yourself from the moment your site is built:
• Copy on the homepage improves searchability
• Meta titles and descriptions on pages
• Backlinks, or inbound links (from social media will do to begin with)
• Use a blog to create unique content often
• Use internal links (links between pages on your site)
• Use short, descriptive URLs
• Use headers and subheaders
• Optimise your images
• Make sure your site loads quickly
• Install an SSL certificateAnd just to drill home pillar number 3, you want to make sure that your tracking is set up properly from the beginning so that you are able to gauge the performance of your SEO efforts and review organic performance.