Conversion Optimisation – Top 10 Usability Checklist
Is your conversion optimisation suffering because of your web design? Are you turning your customers off because your website is difficult to navigate? Does your site load so slowly that your bounce rate is sky high and losing you potential business?
In the spirit of World Usability Day on the 11th of November, I thought it would be useful to create a checklist for the top 10 usability items for your website to help you increase your conversion optimisation.
The idea of World Usability Day is to focus on creating awareness for designs, products and services that improve and facilitate communication around the world so let’s communicate more clearly with our web visitors.
So here are 10 basic usability questions you MUST ask yourself to ensure that your efforts are converting your traffic into sales!
1) Is your website difficult to read?
Is your copy reversed out? Are you using light coloured text on a dark background? If you are, you’re reducing the readability of your website or more importantly your sales copy, it’s going to cost you sales. Use a black serif font on a white background, you might think it’s boring but it works.
2) Is your site easy to navigate?
If you jumped into a new car and the gear stick wasn’t where you expected it or the indicator stalk wasn’t on the steering column you struggle to pull away in a hurry, right?
We’re used to cars having the essentials in the same place, that’s what makes it so easy to drive any car. So why try to confuse your visitors by not putting your navigation in a familiar place with a predictable format? Keep it simple and it will improve your conversion optimisation.
3) Are you Waffling?
Here’s the thing, if you are not talking in plain English you are going to lose your reader’s interest pretty fast. Don’t use technical jargon just because you can, keep it simple and you’ll keep their attention.
Keep you paragraphs brief discussing just one idea per paragraph if you can.
4) Is your page layout and design consistent throughout your entire site?
How frustrating is it when you are trying to buy something online and you get to the checkout but can’t see the proceed button because it’s not in the same place as the previous page?
How does it make you feel if you click on a link on a website and what you get is a page that has no similarity to the one you were just on? Do you think that you have been redirected to another website and cheated in some way? Keep it consistent and it will be reflected in your conversion rate optimisation.
5) Does your site load quickly?
Internet users are getting increasingly impatient as broadband speeds get quicker and we expect instant results. But if your site takes more than just a few seconds to fully load you’re going to have a high bounce rate and lose sales.
Make sure your pages are compressed and images don’t have missing height and width attributes. If you use “image expires” in your header, then browsers will cache the images until a specified date, speeding your load times for returning visitors.
Don’t have nested tables, pages that contain tables inside other tables make the page load slower, since the web browser is forced to find the end of the table before it can display the whole page.
6) Is your content arranged properly with the visitor’s eye being drawn to the desired action you want them to take?
The golden rule here is one page, one action. This means that you should only have one desired action for your visitors for every page on your website. Confusing them with multiple ‘calls to action’ will lead to inaction because they won’t know what to do.
You can use subtle cues like the person in your image looking at your call to action or you can have a big red arrow. And another thing, make sure your written content flows in a way that your visitor ends up arriving at your call to action. Do this and you”ll be rewarded with increased conversion optimisation.
7) Is any text other than your links underlined?
We’ve been trained that underlined text is a clickable link and our eyes are drawn to them. When a site uses underlined text it’s confusing when it’s not a link.
8 ) Is Your Help Section Helpful?
If a visitor has a question they want it answered quickly and easily. Don’t bury your FAQs where they can’t be found. Make it easy for people to get in touch with you. Have your telephone number prominently displayed at the top of every page on your site. Make sure your ‘Contact Us’ page can be found easily and has a short, simple form for emails.
9) Does your site have dead ends?
If you’ve moved or deleted a page or the visitor types int he wrong URL by mistake or you’ve got a broken link, what message do they get? Is it a helpful message that tries to point them in the right direction or do they just get a dead end 404 page not found message?
Make sure you have a custom 404 message that keep visitors on your site.
10) Do you use videos on your website?
Video has proven to increase conversion optimisation because it engages your visitor with you. It’s a great way to build a relationship with your customers and really powerful for search engine optimisation. Use it!
