How do I build a higher converting website?

Corey Winter 0:01
Welcome to 10 minutes to being boss, a bite sized show for creative business owners where we give you actionable insights, tools and tactics. I'm Corey winter, and here's your host Emily Thompson.

Emily Thompson 0:15
So I don't know if anyone realizes this or not, but Cory and I have been working together for and I'm gonna get this wrong, Cory, so please correct me if you know if we've been if we've been together for eight years.

Corey Winter 0:23
by my count, it's seven. Oh, see, I

Emily Thompson 0:27
got it wrong. Wrong. Dangit Lisa overshot? Not under.

Corey Winter 0:30
It was two, it was 2013 wasn't it?

Emily Thompson 0:33
I have no idea. I don't even know what day it is. It's fine. Um, so we've been working together for a really long time. And I initially hired Cory seven years ago, he says, to help me at indie shop Walker feet when I was building websites. So for many years, he worked together on websites and even now one of quarries like the girls that being bosses website manager. So basically, we we speak website to each other. call it that, I don't know.

Corey Winter 1:05
It's actually like its own language, like, you know, the green scrolling code in the matrix. That's how we communicate

Emily Thompson 1:11
clicks in code. It's clicked some code. Yeah. Right. So I figured we could talk websites a little bit today. And this also came from a boss in the community. So we were talking recently about just stuff that we have going on in our business and things you want to learn and look and look towards forward to whatever it may be, and someone brought up the idea of building a higher converting website. So I thought we could talk about that today. I used to totally take your question.

Corey Winter 1:44
Yeah, you kind of stole my thunder, but it's fine. So the question is, how do I build a higher converting website? Good

Emily Thompson 1:51
job, Cory. Thank you for posing that. Let me think about right. So um, whenever I think about this, I feel like I usually come from the design perspective, because even though I originally designed and developed websites, once you really came on board I was designing and you were developing. So I think I'm going to talk to this, or talk about this briefly from a design perspective. And then if you have any ideas for sort of the development, like the nerdy stuff perspective, you can take that sound good, I got you. Okay, but I even think I'm gonna start really early with one of my very favorite questions to ask people when we're doing websites, and I also say, I haven't done a website years other than my own personal stuff. You've you've done a couple. Okay, fine. I did do that one. But we weren't going to talk about that. I've done some secret website projects, guys, just so we know. Thanks, Cory. Thanks. Um, so one of the things or the first question I always ask someone whenever I'm doing their website, especially for business, is if you if your website could do just one thing, what would it be? And I'll tell you, this is a trick question. Always a trick question. Because I'm that person. I'm the person who tests people. And I'm watching and judging as you answer, there are several things that you can say for this. I one time I had them outline, I was thinking about this before, this is how long it's been since I've been in websites, I can't even remember what all the options are, there are three or four of them. And it's things like educate, maybe you just want your website to educate. Or maybe you want your website to, this is the third one that I can't remember. I don't know, there's a third one there. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna bring it up. I can't think of what it is. Wait, what

Corey Winter 3:43
was the second one?

Emily Thompson 3:44
Well, the first one, the first first one, the one that is the answer for anyone who's listening to this podcast. It is you want it to sell your products or services. Because if you are a business, building a website, nine times out of 10, this is going to be the purpose of your website. I think there are some weird situations where that may not be the case, maybe you're creating a side website that is purely educational, or you're building a website, oh community, I think like community was one of those extra ones I told you, it's been years since I've really thought about this. The most important one here is that you want your website to sell your products or services. Whenever you get really clear on that purpose, and your website can do lots of things. But whenever you're clear on that purpose, every road should lead to either contacting you so that you can sell your products or service or checking out so that you're selling your products or services. So this is what's happening on your homepage. This is what's happening on your about page. It's what's happening on your blog posts. It's what's happening on your product descriptions, your sales pages, every road should lead to checkout and whatever form that takes So that's something that's very important to sort of take note of it is the crux of your website strategy as a business, everything should be leading to you brought you selling your products or services. Part of that is you should also always be telling people what to do next, every page of your website should have a call to action, whether that's going to the next page, or going to checkout or signing up for a newsletter or whatever it may be, you need to be telling people what to do next, if people land on a website that has no call to actions, calls to action, as a call to actions are calls to action,

Corey Winter 5:37
it's multiple calls in one action, so calls to action calls

Emily Thompson 5:41
to action, I guess you could have a call to actions, I guess

Corey Winter 5:45
it could go either way.

Emily Thompson 5:48
Okay, I like calls to action, you need to have calls to action, so that people can take the action that you want them to do next. Another little, here's my design focused higher converting website tactic is to designate a CTA color. And by CTA mean call to action. That is, it's a brand color that you have. But it's an color that's only used on your website, on buttons, or on things that you want people to click. So if you go to the being boss website being boss club, you'll see that the yellow, that bright yellow color is our call to action color. We've designated this one, it's very bright, you'll see it core, your mouth is hanging up, and you never realized that I was doing well. There you go. So you're training your visitors to take the action that is seen in that color. So all of our buttons, and he's sort of links and not all links, most of our links are blue. But if you go through our sites, I'm like have little squiggly yellow backgrounds. That's because those are calls to action designate a call to action color that you are using on your website, pretty much only in the event of a call to action. Also, if you'll notice on some of our sales pages, those call to action backgrounds, like those big wide flooded images around like where you're buying a thing, or also yellow, or using that color to sort of, I guess, psychologically tell you

Corey Winter 7:21
subconsciously consciously giving away trade secrets here,

Emily Thompson 7:24
right? I mean, it's a tactic that I'm sharing, right? Pick a CTA color that you're using only for those calls to action. Okay, there's some of my less nerdy stuff though. apparently one of them was so nerdy, you didn't even notice I like it. Thanks. What do you have Corey?

Corey Winter 7:41
Okay, so there are two big performance things that everyone should consider. And the big one is load times, there is debate on how fast a website should load ideally. But my general rule of thumb is that if your website takes longer than three seconds to load, it's too slow. But you also have to consider that load times on desktop computers are going to be faster than load times on mobile devices. And this is because mobile devices are generally just not as powerful. So even if your website loads fast on desktop, it might not be loading fast on mobile devices. And the reason load times are so important is because for example, if your website takes longer than 10 seconds to load, I'm not going to sit there and wait for it. The age of the internet. And the idea that we have access to the entire world in the palm of our hands has made humanity impatient smartphones have programmed us to desire instant gratification. I'm actually looking at a report from skilled dotco that did a study on how page load times affect conversion rates. And they tracked this statistics from companies like Walmart, eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo. This study actually backs up my rule of thumb that if your website takes longer than three seconds to load, you could be losing out on nearly half of your visitors. So that's cool. The study also mentions that pages that load in two and a half seconds had a 1.9% conversion rate, while pages that load in 4.2 seconds, not much longer have less than a 1% conversion rate. So that one second difference makes all the difference. It's a pretty fascinating study. So I'll be sure to link to that in the show notes.

Emily Thompson 9:17
The thing that everyone can take from this is, especially when it comes to online shopping, and this is online shopping, whether it's a service or a product is the least amount of I mean, the smallest amount of resistance could lose USL and that resistance can literally be as small as it taking two seconds too long for your site to load.

Corey Winter 9:38
Yeah, like I was trying to check the status of my stimulus check the other day. Yeah, was that the IRS website was just not loading. I just gave up. My personal conversion rate for that website was zero. So who knows if I'm getting my check or not. Anyway, the second biggest thing for website performance is making sure that it works. website is mobile friendly. Every year, the amount of users that are accessing websites on mobile devices goes up significantly. Now, today, more than half of users on the internet are mobile users. That means that the majority of users accessing your website are doing so from a phone or tablet. So if your website is not easy to use and navigate on small screens, you could potentially be losing out on a lot of conversions.

Emily Thompson 10:27
What I want to say about this, too, is is not just that you have a mobile version of your website, because I feel like finally that standard, I feel like for years, we were selling people on how important it was to have mobile filling there. No, I just want desktop like everyone knows the importance of that. But it's not just having a mobile version of your site. So you know, if you scale your screen down really small, it's a small site. It's also making it easy to use for mobile users. So if your links are too small, it's not mobile friendly. If you have half of your menu disappears, it's not mobile friendly, a lot more goes into it being actually quote unquote, mobile friendly than it does, or then just, you know, you having a small version of your site.

Corey Winter 11:07
Yeah. And for designers that I work with, I have actually started requesting that we implement a mobile first design philosophy. And this means that when we are creating the website mock up, we actually create what it looks like on mobile devices first. And from there, we adapt the design to desktops. In other words, the mobile layout has started to take priority.

Emily Thompson 11:29
Oh, I didn't know that. But I love it. Oh, how times have changed. How times have changed.

Corey Winter 11:37
I saw statistic that more than 4 billion people are accessing the internet from mobile devices,

Emily Thompson 11:43
which blows my mind sounds like a lot. And everyone, all that 3 billion is just babies. True that babies and just like really old people who don't want their phones, like anyone who's within the age bracket of like phone owning or using are doing it. That's crazy. My two

Corey Winter 12:03
year old nephew, accesses the internet on an iPad Gee, he knows how to navigate YouTube better than I do.

Emily Thompson 12:12
find their Pampers on the internet, right. But you also were pulling up a statistic earlier that I want to point out that mobile is still not the end all be all. Because even though people are searching using mobile, they are actually buying on their desktop. And I can attest to this, I will browse things online all the time. But I hate checking out on mobile like when it comes to typing in my all of my information, I don't want to do that on my phone, I will go to a desktop to purchase the thing. So mobile first, yes, but you also still need to have a really great experience on your desktop as well. Right. So since this is supposed to only be a 10 minute episode, that's where we're going to start basically Cory and I could talk for weeks about how to build an amazing high converting website. But I feel like those are the basics. And it is one make sure you are really narrowed in on that core purpose of your website. And that is for you to be or for your website to be selling your product or service. And everything should support your website in doing that. You can do that by telling people what to do next. And you can make it easy for them to take that action. By designated a call to action color that is used specifically and only for things like buttons or links or sections of your website, we're trying to tell them to do something. And then on the tech side of things, make sure your website loads quickly. And you should test this on your desktop, on your phone, on the Internet at the coffee shop, all of those things to make sure that your website is loading quickly. And also make sure your website is mobile friendly and all the ways that it should be not just that it has a small size that it's actually usable in mobile as well.

Corey Winter 13:56
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