5 Reasons Why Your Website Is Not Converting

Faced with a website that isn't converting? Here are five reasons why your conversion rate is underwhelming.

How do you measure the success of a site? Conversion.

You could have a lot of traffic going to your site, but those visits don’t really matter if you aren’t converting them into customers. The only visitors that matter are those that are adding to your bottom-line. All other traffic is essentially wasted.

Are you finding yourself with a lot of traffic, selling the right products at competitive prices, yet not with many paying customers? Then read on to find out why your site isn’t converting and what you can do about it.

Check Your Current Conversion Rate

First things first, you should know your current conversion rate. Whether you measure your conversions by product purchases, brochure downloads or email newsletter signups: you need to be measuring and tracking those conversions regularly. You can track your conversion rate using Goals in Google Analytics, or through any other analytics platform of your choosing.

So what’s considered a good conversion rate? The ideal rate is between 2 to 3 percent. This rate could be higher or lower based on the value of the conversion (e.g. you’d have more difficulty converting customers if you’re selling products or services worth $10,000+). But if you’re having less than 2 percent conversion and your conversion value isn’t very high, then you might have a problem on your hands.

Here are five reasons why your site may be underperforming.

#1. You’re Providing a Bad Mobile Experience

If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, there is no way it will survive in these times. It isn’t enough for your site to be responsive, it has to be designed specifically for mobile in terms of content and structure. Failure to do so would mean marginalizing a substantial portion of your customer base and in turn decreasing your conversion rate.

But what does designing for mobile entail?

  • Using large and easily legible text
  • Using short paragraphs
  • Making sure that every key feature is just a tap away
  • Having just a single call-to-action

The key is to keep testing your mobile site. Perhaps you should even ask customers and family members for feedback on your site’s mobile experience. Afterwards, you should review what is working and what is not – and address those issues.

As long as you do not ignore the importance of having a good mobile experience for your site, you can easily hone in on the reason(s) your site is not converting.

#2. No Call to Action

Your website could be user-friendly with engaging and quality content, but without a clear and concise call-to-action, you simply won’t convert. Users may want to convert but just don’t have the opportunity or means to do so. Because you haven’t provided it.

Make your call-to-action clear, concise, prominent, specific and compelling. Provide all the information users need so they know exactly what you want them to do next. Create calls-to-action that are relevant and specific; and place them in a prominent place on every page of your site.

Whatever you do, make sure it is very easy for the user to convert when they are ready to.

#3. Your Users Are Annoyed with Your Website

You may be missing out on conversion opportunities if there is something off-putting about your site. Look at your bounce rate: if it is high, then you know there is something that is not appealing to users.

In such a case, you need to find out what the problem is – directly from the user. You may use heat maps and look at your user journeys via Google Analytics, but perhaps it will make your job easier to ask users directly (e.g. via a quick survey).

A few common annoyances on websites:

  • You do not offer any useful information
  • Navigation is too difficult
  • You have too many ads or popups
  • Your site doesn’t look good

These are all problems with a rather easy fix. Take your time investigating them and fix the errors as soon as you can.

#4. You’re Off-Target

Your website should be anything but general. A lot of website owners aim to please everyone – but they can’t – and end up isolating their entire audience.

Perhaps you’re writing for the wrong audience, perhaps you’re writing for a larger demographic than you should be; whatever the case, inaccurate targeting could negatively impact your conversion rate. Your copy, branding, marketing and site design should speak directly to a niche demographic.

Conduct market research to properly define and know your audience.

#5. You Have a Slow Site

We previously covered the importance of website load speed and provided tips on to speed up your site. When your website doesn’t load fast, your visitors leave and are unlikely to visit again in the near future.

There are many factors that can slow down your site, such as:

  • A site that isn’t optimized for mobile
  • Broken links
  • Not using caching
  • Messy code
  • Images that aren’t optimized
  • Flash and Java
  • Average web hosting

You can check your current site speed via Page Speed Insights. If your site is taking longer than 3 seconds to load, you need to work on it. Studies show that most users quickly exit sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load.

Measure, Measure and Measure

This is actually a sixth reason why your site may not be converting. Measure, measure and keep measuring. If you’re not measuring, you’re guessing, and in turn, not really making any strides.

The problem most website owners encounter is that they are either not tracking their website traffic or that they are tracking but not reviewing their metrics. Some do know they should be tracking, but just aren’t sure what to look for or what to make of the results.

Well, you should always start with your goals in mind. Then you can identify which key metrics will help you to measure your progress towards those goals.

Once you start measuring, you can improve on those metrics; figure out what is working, what isn’t, and then fine-tune and optimize.

Wrapping Up

These five reasons are just a starting point to help boost your conversion rates. There are many other reasons why your site may not be converting. However, these are fairly common in under-converting sites.

If you find that any of these reasons apply to your business, simply make the changes and you’ll see a big difference or improvement in your conversion rates and bottom line.

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