How Better Design Can Increase Your Revenue

Have you ever looked at your own website through the eyes of a visitor? It’s not something many of us ever do. We just get used to how things look and we grow too close to our website, our online store and our apps, to see it with fresh eyes. It’s human nature, but being able to see what others see is an important aspect of design. Often though, that familiarity can cost you money. In other cases, not realising problems exist can cost you even more.

Design, like fashion, food and hairstyles go through changes. What is considered cutting-edge today, won’t be seen the same way tomorrow. If you’re looking to increase your revenue, then maybe it’s time to take another look at your website and see if better design can increase your bank balance, as well as your visitor numbers.

Of course, an increase in revenue is all relative. Depending on the size of your business, increases, even ones in low single digits, could be huge financially. For small to medium-sized businesses, an increase that reaches double digits could be the difference between profit and loss for this fiscal year. You might be pulling your hair out trying to think of your next ingenious advertising campaign, but an increase in revenue might be as simple as a rethink on the design of your website.

Any website is a shop window to the world. It’s more than just an online front for your company, it’s a revenue generating tool and, as such, needs to be thought of like that. Even if you don’t sell directly through your page, it can still hold influence over customers' buying decisions. You may not be the most technically-minded, but with just a few simple tips, you could be doubling click-throughs, tripling revenue and quadrupling visitors' expectations.

With the speed of the modern world ever increasing, it’s no wonder that your website needs to keep up with how we live our lives. With people accessing more and more of their web traffic through a mobile device, their patience with slow responding websites is shrinking. The first place to look at increasing revenue is your website’s performance.

No matter how fast their connection, some things in design remain constant. Text loads quicker than images, images load quicker than animation and so on. If your website is hamstrung by a multitude of images or an overload of graphical wizardry, it might be time to streamline. Slow performance, even when measured by milliseconds, can have a detrimental effect on your business. Amazon, who are no slouches when it comes to e-commerce, saw a 1% drop in revenue for every 100 milliseconds lost. As we said, revenue is all relative, so a 1% drop for you is probably going to be much less than it is for Amazon, but the math still works out. On average, 40% of commerce users abandon their sale if webpages take more than 3 seconds to load. Can you afford to lose that time and money?

With the rise of the smartphone and tablet, internet browsing has truly gone mobile. Which is why having a responsive website is vital. Responsiveness, in website terms, means that the page will adapt automatically depending on the screen it’s being viewed upon. It will look one way if someone is browsing on their huge desktop computer screen, and another if they’re looking at it on their mobile phone. The content will remain the same, but the experience will change, because it is optimised for both the user and the device. This isn’t some clever technical sleight of hand, it’s an important business differentiator. Making sure your website is responsive goes a long way to increasing revenue from your customers, because they always get the very best experience. Remember what happens to those with slow loading times!

So whilst we’ve talked about your site being accessible on different devices. How accessible is it to those with different abilities? Not everyone of your customers will have perfect vision or full use of their hands or fingers. This is where good design really comes into its own. How good is your site for those with colour blindness, for example? Around 4.5% of the entire world lives with some form of colour deficiency disability. Is this reflected in the design of your site? Does it clearly state the colour of an item in your online store? You may also need to cater for those for whom manual dexterity is a problem. Another reason to ensure your website is responsive, especially if using a mouse is a problem for some people.

These are just some of the design challenges you may have, but there are plenty more. Maybe it’s time to take a new look at some of your old pages to see what comes to light.