In the world of eCommerce, great design makes all the difference between attracting customers and losing those customers to competitors. Chances are, those competitors are working hard, right this minute, on keeping their website design fresh and interesting.
Are you?
With so many online stores vying for consumers' attention, your website needs to stand out. It must be easy to use, be visually aligned with your unique brand personality, and be written in a way that informs, inspires, and resonates with your best-fit audience.
When done well, a website‘s design will attract consumers and convert them from curious visitor to satisfied customer.
If you’re looking to boost your sales and increase conversions, here are some quick e-commerce website design projects that can level up your store into one that engages, converts, and delights your customers!
10 Quick Projects to Level Up Your Ecommerce Website Design
Here are some simple, easy-to-implement website fixes you can do in 1 month or less to boost your website and start seeing those conversions.
1. A User Experience (UX) Analysis and Quick Tweaks = A User-Friendly Website
Timeline: UX Analysis: 1 Week | Tweaks: 1–2 Weeks
If you want customers to take their time and spend money on your website, then it’s going to have to be a welcoming place that they don’t mind spending time in!
Keep it simple, uncluttered, and, above all, easy to navigate. You want to offer a positive shopping experience, from the moment your potential customer lands on your site to the moment they make a purchase.
Whatever your customer is looking for on your website, it needs to be easy for them to find. Split up your products into categories, have your contact info prominently placed, and make your checkout process easy, straightforward, and as pain-free as possible.
Your website also needs to be easy to read. Adjust your page layouts subtly to align with already established human-machine interface studies. It’s not as Terminator as it sounds. There are actual studies done to help folks just like you to optimize the design of website interfaces to make them as easy to read as possible.
To help further with that, adjust the typeface size, leading, tracking, and UX colors to provide maximum conversion optimization and readability.
And since it’s likely that your customers are finding you from a smartphone, be sure that your website is mobile and tablet friendly as well.
2. Highlight Your Specials and Promotions with Updated Design and Copy
Timeline: Choose Promotions: 1 day | Design fresh visuals: 4–6 days | Write fresh copy: 2 days
Nothing gets interest up like a sale!
Just the same way brick-and-mortar stores and other small businesses put up banners and end caps to highlight their sales and promotions, you can highlight yours in your e-commerce business too.
Using contrasting colors (black and white, red and purple, blue and yellow), shapes, or highlights is a quick and simple way to draw attention to any price drops, seasonal sales, or promotions you’ve got going on.
If you’ve got a special offer, like free shipping with purchase of $50 or more, or maybe a BOGO deal going on, be sure to highlight that too so your customers know what a great deal they’re getting.
Furthermore, if you’ve got some tried and true best sellers, why not label them as such? Put them front-and-center on your website where they can’t be missed.
If you’re in need of some ideas for promotions you can use to drum up interest in your site, you can use previous campaigns to decide which new sales or product releases, or holiday offers stand the best chance of generating new customers. Select one loss leader to get new visitors “in the door” and then go from there.
Ask your Creative Director to provide 3–5 ideas for new visuals that stay brand-aligned, but push the boundaries of your visuals in order to attract new shoppers and start them down your funnel!
3. Gather New Customer Testimonials
Timeline: Gather Testimonials: 1 Week | Design and Publish: 4 days
Word of mouth sells!
It just does.
To gather up some testimonials, try using your email platform (MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, etc) or social media sites to send a mass message to all your customers, offering to enter them into a $50 Amazon Gift Card giveaway if they provide product reviews and store testimonials for the website.
Re-send it four days later to anyone who hasn’t opened the first message. You’re bound to get several takers, leaving you with plenty of material to work with.
Then all you have to do is hand them off to your Creative Director to design a visual way to display those shiny, new testimonials or, if you’re using a website visitor, hop in and look for an existing widget to reuse.
To most customers, an online review is more trustworthy than anything a salesperson could say. That’s what makes testimonials such a powerful marketing tool. Seeing that other people are satisfied with your product, customer service, and e-commerce store overall is sometimes all it takes to convert another lead into a sale.
4. Quick SEO Refresh
Timeline: Keyword research: 1 day for every two website pages | Implement new headings structure (h1–h5), title tags, alt tags, and meta descriptions: 1 day per webpage.
Using the right keywords can help your e-commerce site move up higher on a list of search results, meaning more traffic for you and more opportunities to convert leads.
To find those special words, try out some SEO tools, like SEMRush or AHRefs, and choose some trending keywords to use on your site. Aim to use about 5 per page and then hit those keywords as many times as you can (without being obnoxious about it!) within the copy of your product pages and in short explainer paragraphs on your site.
You can rank even higher by updating each of your page’s meta title tags to include your best keyword of the bunch. Update all the headings on the page as well, to integrate even more keywords.
Whatever your primary keyword is, try to use it several times, in any place it fits, including your copy, your image alt tags (your images should always have descriptive alt tags!), and the headers of your pages.
It can be tricky to do this without your copy coming off stilted and awkward, so this is a good time to have your Creative Director collaborate with a copywriter to sprinkle your keywords throughout your website in a way that sounds natural.
You should also collaborate with your Creative Director to brainstorm what phrases your best-fit leads might be searching with to find your products. Run those ideas through your SEO tool of choice and see which phrases you can rank highest for.
It will also boost your SEO to have your website be easily scannable.
What we mean by that is laying out the content of your website in a way that lets customers see everything they need to see at just a glance. No one wants to scroll forever to get what they’re looking for, so help them out.
Use big headers, keep product descriptions short, accurate, and to the point, and use bullets, lists, and images for easier readability.
You can even embed SEO right into your site to take advantage of metrics and data that you can use to refine your strategies.
5. Upgrade Product Photography and Website Graphics
Timeline: Varies from 4 days to 1 month.
You probably wouldn’t be very surprised to know that there are online stores out there using fuzzy, lo-res photos on their websites.
To attract more customers, however, your website can’t be one of them. Always use high-quality images on your site, whether they’re product images or anything else.
Not only do high-resolution images enhance your products, but it helps your website to look more polished and professional.
While you’re at it, consider using GIFs in place of a few of your images to draw customers' attention to best sellers or, especially if you’re selling clothing, reveal both the front and back of your product.
Don’t just stick to pictures of just your product either. It helps greatly for your customers to be able to see your product in action (or worn), so take several different pictures and make a slideshow for customers to look through while they consider if they want to make a purchase.
If you’re having trouble determining if your images are up to snuff, look through every page on a high-dpi display, like Apple’s Retina displays or any other high-dpi monitor. What you’re searching for are any photos or graphics that look pixelated.
If you find some, here’s a quick fix:
Find the source image and resize it to double its intended size, then save it at a highly compressed output.
When possible, save images as .webp or .svg. If you’re not sure how to do so, ask your Creative Director and do a quick search to see if your website can automatically convert or display those file types.
6. Website Color Schemes That Win Use Colors Intentionally
Timeline: Analyze current color scheme: 3 days
Yes, you probably already have colors picked out to match your brand, but colors are also a very powerful tool to elicit emotion and create certain feelings around a product.
There’s some psychology involved but, basically, by choosing certain colors you can subconsciously lead your potential customers into a sale. Here are some examples:
- The color red can inspire excitement. Use it for “Purchase Now” or “Add to Cart” or any other call-to-action buttons.
- Blue backgrounds can create a sense of tranquility and trustworthiness.
- Highlighting your sales and promotions in bright colors like orange, yellow, or red grabs attention and creates urgency.
- Yellow can also bring a sense of lightness or even springtime freshness depending on the hue and saturation.
There’s plenty to work with. Give yourself (and your creative team) the freedom to use non-brand colors for limited-run promotions!
We are all about brand management here at Designity, and much of our platform is dedicated to making brand alignment a reality for businesses of every size, but sometimes?
Well, sometimes we all need to break outside of our own boxes.
If you don’t have pink in your brand guide, that doesn’t mean you have to ignore Valentine’s Day. Ask your Creative Director to bring some secondary and tertiary colors to use for holiday promotions and new product launches.
7. Lead Forms
Timeline: Design: 5 days | Implement: 1 Week
It’s not just about pop-ups. This is controversial because depending on which studies you read, you can be led to believe that website users must love popups because they continue to work.
However, the reality is that no human loves pop-ups. Bots love them, though, so if you use them, you can expect lots of leads that don’t result in sales.
Instead, for lead-collecting forms, consider header placement, sidebar placement, or slide-in animated forms.
If your theme requires a pop-up, have it triggered by user input (like clicking a button to sign up, which invites the pop-up to appear). Never show a popup without having the customer ask for it. In the long run, it destroys trust and interrupts the user experience. (Plus, they’re extremely annoying.)
Once you’ve put lead forms on your website for your customers to interact with, all you’ll need is something to give in exchange for their valuable information.
Consider offering a discount in exchange for an email address, giving “future you” a chance to engage with that customer once they’ve gotten a chance to think about their purchase.
You can also auto-generate a nurture email to go out a few days later to remind them about their coupon. Who knows? Maybe that email will hit at the right time, and they’ll decide to come back!
8. Toot Your Own Horn
Timeline: Write copy: 4 days | Implement: 3 days
Hey, there’s nothing wrong with knowing how great your website is.
You know it, we know it, shouldn’t your customers know it too?
They absolutely should, so don’t be afraid to toot your own horn a little bit!
If your site has a competitive advantage over another, such as free shipping, first delivery free, a “no questions asked” refund policy, or a free bumper sticker/beer koozie, etc. with each purchase, then highlight that!
It doesn’t need to take up much space, either. It can be something as simple as a call-out at the top of your website.
Get with your Creative Director and see where these call-outs can be most effective.
9. Make Your Customers Feel Safe
Timeline: 3 days
The simple truth is, anyone entering credit card information into a website needs to know that their money and data are safe.
Period.
So, it’s up to you to keep their purchase and credit card information locked up tight.
SSL encrypt your site and put up trust signals (Secure shopping, SSL encrypted) so that your customers are aware that cybersecurity is something that is important to you.
Making your customers feel secure goes beyond just cyberattacks. It helps to clearly outline your store policies too. Whatever your cancellation, refund, and shipping policies are, have them clearly explained and posted somewhere they can be easily found and read.
There should be no surprises when shopping on your website.
A frequently-asked-questions section can also be very helpful, allowing you to be able to address potential concerns or issues and make your customers feel more confident making a purchase from your store.
10. Words of Encouragement
Timeline: Write copy: 2 days | Design banners: 4 days | Implement: 2 days
Here’s an easy tip that can potentially make a huge difference.
You need to be your customer’s favorite cheerleader!
You’re grateful for their business, after all, so why not show it?
Little messages like “You just saved 10%” or “That’s a great choice!” or “Your item has been added to your shopping cart. Thanks for choosing us!” can go a long way with your customers.
It makes them feel appreciated and gives you that personal touch that helps folks feel comfortable spending money in your online store.
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The Sky’s the Limit!
There you have it!
By implementing our tried-and-true web design tips, you can boost your sales and drive your business all in less than a month!
As always, remember to keep track of the elements that are working and the ones that aren’t so you can constantly refine your strategy and keep your website one that customers happily come back to again and again!
What’s your favorite e-commerce web design tip?
