What is Website Optimisation – and Why Should You Do It?

In an ideal world, you would like every visitor to your site to do something – whether that is to make a purchase, submit a form, download your content or sign up for a newsletter. When someone does any of these things, it is called a ‘conversion’. The percentage of visitors that do what you want them to do is your ‘conversion rate’.

It makes sense that the better your website is at meeting people’s needs, the more likely they are to convert. Website optimisation is about making changes to get more value out of the traffic which is already visiting your site, rather than just increasing the number of visitors.

Here we will give you more information about what website optimisation is and how it can help your business, as well as giving you some tips on getting started.

Put simply, website optimisation is about improving user experience, so that visitors are more like to convert – whether that is to buy something, subscribe to something or download something.

Website optimisation isn’t a complete redesign of your site. Many businesses feel that they need to redesign their sites every few years, but this might have the opposite effect to the one you want and actually reduce conversions. The key to website optimisation is to make the changes that your audience actually wants.

The way you find out what people want is a scientific process – with just a bit of guesswork thrown in. Start with a hypothesis that you think could improve your conversion rate. Your hypothesis could be something like: ‘I think more people will convert if there is less text on the landing pages’ or ‘I think more people will convert if the button is at the top of the page’.

Then go ahead and test your hypothesis using A/B, or split, testing. We will go into more detail on that at the end of this article, or you can read about it in more depth elsewhere on our blog. If your hypothesis is right, go ahead and make the changes and, if it’s wrong, stick with your original design.

The website optimisation process teaches you about your target audience and their likes and dislikes. Over time, the answers you get will help you to come up with hypotheses and tests which are even better. Eventually, you will end up with a website which is exactly right for the traffic you want. This ‘perfect’ website for the traffic you want may not have been what you would have come up with on your own.

If you’re still not sure whether website optimisation is for you, think about what you want to achieve. Would you like to get double the conversions for the same amount of traffic? If so, you definitely need to work on optimising your site.

Bringing more visitors alone to your website won’t necessarily increase your conversions. They need to be the right sort of visitors – visitors that convert.

Whether you produce all of your site’s content yourself, pay a member of staff to do it for you, pay an external contractor to do it or pay for every click through something like Google Ads, bringing people to your site is costing you money.

But if you can increase the percentage of people who visit your site and go on to buy something or subscribe, you are increasing your conversions without it costing you any more.

In an ideal world and with unlimited resources, you would test and optimise everything on your site. But few of us have the luxury of unlimited resources, so you need to target some key areas.

Ask yourself why people visit your site and what problem they need solving. It could be that they visit your site to look at shoes, to find out more information or to answer a complex question.

Then ask yourself what you want them to do while they are on your site. If you are selling shoes, you probably want them to buy shoes. But you might also want them to subscribe to your blog, download a video or read your latest advice on prolonging the life of their shoes.

When you know why people are on your site and what you want them to do, consider how they get from their ‘why’ (eg look at shoes) to your ‘what’ (eg buy shoes). 

Is there a clear and straightforward path for them?

Is there a better way for them to get there? 

Is anything going wrong on the way to make them less likely to buy the shoes? 

Could you make the process easier for them?

In the absence of unlimited resources, it is best to focus your optimisation on a few key areas. These include:

• Landing pages – your landing pages are the first place a visitor arrives at on your site. They click on a link – maybe in an ad or on another website – and end up on your landing page. As their very first experience of your site, you need to make a good impression with everything running smoothly. Optimising your landing pages can have a really positive impact on your conversions.

• Home page – this is where visitors will end up if they just search for your company, rather than get to your site through an external link. Your home page can have a huge influence on your conversions and it has a complex job to do in directing visitors to other parts of your site, including product pages, payment pages and your blog. The process for optimising your home page may not be the same as the process for your landing pages, so make sure you test it and optimise it individually.

• Checkout/ payment pages – for an ecommerce company, a smooth checkout process is essential to your business. If it’s not entirely clear whether the process is safe, how much delivery costs or when a product is likely to be delivered, many potential customers will walk away, leaving products in their baskets. Work to optimise your checkout process can reduce abandoned baskets and boost your sales.

• Conversion points – any point where a visitor can convert eg make a purchase, subscribe to your newsletter or download a video needs to be optimised to ensure the process runs as smoothly as possible. Is your call-to-action button really visible on a smartphone? Is your form easy to fill in?

Optimising key pages on your website is one way to increase conversions. Another way is to track user behaviour on your site and make changes in response to their behaviour.

When it comes to user behaviour, every business and every industry will be different. The target audience for a women’s fashion brand will behave very differently to the target audience for a business to business brand operating in the construction industry. But both brands would benefit from understanding their users and optimising their sites to meet their users’ needs.

There are two main forms of software tool to track user behaviour – quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative website optimisation tools focus purely on the numbers of visitors and the way they behave eg 85% of visitors to this page bounce or 50% of shoppers abandon their baskets before checkout.

Google Analytics is a free tool which most businesses will already have set up on their sites to track this sort of data. There are also a number of paid options available to give you this information, including how specific users or groups of users move through your site, how far people are scrolling and when they are clicking. This sort of information is invaluable in highlighting where there may be problems on your website.

Qualitative website optimisation tools focus more on why visitors behave in the way they do. So you know that you have an 85% bounce rate from your quantitative data, but you don’t know why. There are a range of qualitative website optimisation tools available which can give you that next level of data, to help you optimise your site to meet the needs of your own target audience.

There are pros and cons of both quantitative and qualitative data and, as neither option gives you the full picture, it is a good idea to use both sorts of tool together to give you a clearer picture of what works and doesn’t work for your users.

Testing on your site in preparation for website optimisation is usually called A/B testing, or split testing. To conduct a meaningful and scientific test, you will probably need to use an online optimisation tool. There are both free and paid options available. Google Content Experiments is a free tool which is part of Google Analytics, so is a great place to start for smaller and newer businesses.

All of the testing tools available will split traffic between different variations of pages on your site to see how your visitors respond to each variation.

Start by picking an area of your site to test – a landing page is a good place to start. Make sure you plan your A/B test in advance, so that you can be sure that the results are meaningful and you can act on them.

To help you plan an effective test, there are four key areas to focus on:

1. Buyer persona – how well do you know your target audience? You probably have a reasonable idea of who is interested in your site and your products. But by building up a detailed buyer persona you will be better able to come up with products, designs and content to meet the needs of your target audience. Some things you should know about your audience are:

• Gender (predominantly male or female or an even mix of both)

• Average age

• Aims (what do they want to achieve with the help of your product or service?)

• Needs (are they buying for themselves, their families or on behalf of a business?)

• Budget (how much are they willing to spend, is cost a big issue for them?)

• Selling points (what gets your customer excited about your product or service? Remember this might be very different to what gets you excited)

The key to effective testing is to work out what your target audience wants. Once you know the answer to that question, you need to optimise your site to make sure you can give it to them.

2. Your goals – the aim of website optimisation is to get more people to do what you want them to do on your site. You need to define clear and measurable goals to know if the results of your tests are meaningful.

So before going ahead with your testing, think about:

• What is my ultimate goal? (eg to increase sales)

• How will testing help me achieve my goal? (If testing and optimisation leads to more email sign-ups or content downloads, that also helps towards the ultimate aim of increasing sales)

• Am I increasing conversion volume or conversion quality? (Your work could lead to significantly more sales of your cheapest product, but would you rather have a small increase in sales of your higher-end products?)

• Who is my ideal customer? (Are you looking for a big one-off sale or repeat business from a customer?)

If your goal is to increase sales, there isn’t much point in optimising your blog (unless it has been shown to bring lots of visitors to your sales pages). It would be far more effective to work on optimising your landing pages.

3. Your hypothesis – you know who your audience is and you know what you want them to do, so now you need to come up with a hypothesis about why they may not be converting.

Here are some reasons your visitors may not be converting, which can form the basis of your hypothesis for testing:

• Your product descriptions aren’t right – they are looking for something to meet a specific need and your product descriptions aren’t selling that to them

• The next step isn’t obvious – your call-to-action button isn’t visible or interesting

• You aren’t meeting your audience’s needs – are you offering a complicated solution to a simple problem, or a simple solution which doesn’t fully respond to a complex issue?

• You aren’t connecting with your audience’s emotions – if your site doesn’t stir the right emotions in your visitors, they won’t connect with your products or services

• Your page looks untrustworthy – make it clear that your site is secure and that transactions use a recognised payment security measure, and make sure any reviews on your site are positive, but not over-the-top

• Your content is confusing – whether it is badly written or badly designed, confusing content will turn your visitors away long before they convert

• Your traffic is wrong – if your site isn’t meeting the needs of the customers you want to attract, it could be attracting the wrong traffic, which won’t convert. Website optimisation will help you attract the right traffic

4. Record and learn – the final stage is to carry out your testing, record your results and use them to create new hypotheses and further tests. Recording the results can be as simple or as complex as you like, as long as it is understandable and meaningful – and you act on it!

An example would be:

• Hypothesis: Clearer product descriptions will sell more shoes than the current descriptions.

• Original: Current product descriptions

• Variant: New clearer product descriptions

Record the number of visits, conversions and the conversion rate for each variant to find out if your hypothesis is correct or incorrect.

If the variant returns better results than your original copy, you should optimise your product descriptions, before moving on to your next test.

Website optimisation isn’t complicated, although it will take a little time to get it right. Essentially, it is giving your customers what they want eg clearer product descriptions to get what you want, for example selling more products or increasing subscribers. You just have to work out how best to give your visitors what they want, so that you can get what you want too!

Testing and making changes to optimise your website can ensure you fix any problem areas and give your visitors the experience they are looking for from your site.