Hey I’m Shane, welcome to another issue of The CRO Weekly where each week I explore how to build a high converting Ecommerce store. If you’re not subscribed you can do so here:
“What should I do to improve my website?”
If you ask this to any marketer they’ll immediately start suggesting ideas.
in-cart upsells
post-purchase upsells
bundles
sampler products
more lifestyle imagery
videos
the list goes on and on.
All of these recommendations typically have one thing in common – they try to improve your site by adding new things.
Adding things is nice. It feels like progress. Designers, developers, marketers – we all get paid to add things. But often times new things are confusing and distracting ultimately making the user’s experience worse.
This isn’t just an accident, it’s a systemic problem. Here’s Nassim Taleb on making good decisions when optimizing a system:
We know a lot more about what is wrong, what is bad, what is harmful, or what won’t work, than we know about what is right, what is good, what is beneficial, and what would work. Negative knowledge is more robust than positive knowledge.
Basically, adding things is complicated and it’s hard to know what will work. Removing things is much easier. Let’s look at some examples.
Killing conversions with distractions
Someone just saw your latest ad. They thought it was compelling and clicked through to your homepage. (forget advertising best practices and landing pages for a sec)
We have one goal for them here – get them shopping. But instead, this is the page they see:
9 different options for them to take. Only 1 of them has a link for people to shop. Anything that is not pushing people to take the primary action on the page is a distraction and should probably be removed.
Compare that with an effective landing page. Have you ever noticed how high performing landing pages don’t include a navigation bar?
In fact, landing pages don’t include links to anything but the offer. They’re optimized around a singular goal by removing any and all distractions. Applying this same idea to the Taut page would look something like this:
Friction
Distractions aren’t the only thing killing conversions. The other is friction. Anything that makes it more difficult for someone to take the primary action on your page is a form of friction.
A classic example is a form that requires you fill in your social security number. That one field is a big point of friction. You can reduce the friction by sufficiently explaining why you need it and adding trust signals. But generally speaking – the best way to reduce friction is by removing things.
Something as small as a chat widget can be a form of friction. It may be a small, seemingly-unobtrusive widget in the bottom corner of your screen. When you test it like Patrick Coddou has it tells a different story:
Chat widgets are small and tucked in the corner on desktop but on mobile you can see how they may get in the way of taking action:
If you accidentally click on it, it takes up your entire screen:
For your less digitally-native customers finding that X in the top right corner to close this out can actually be a struggle and at best is annoying. As a bottom line, you don’t want anything to get in the way of customers taking action on your site.
Another major point of friction is site speed.
Think about it. Viewing a product and then going back to the collection to view another product requires 3 page loads. If each load takes more than a few seconds it’s going to get old quick.
By far the easiest way to improve your site speed is to remove things. Remove apps, remove images, remove embedded videos, anything that isn’t helping your customers convert.
I often see sites that have apps loading in dynamic content from instagram, an embedded YouTube video, and a hero slideshow with 3 massive images. Hardly any of that is necessary and ends up adding multiple seconds to page load times. Not to mention, a lot of that content may also be a distraction!
Site speed can be a complicated topic but there’s nothing more impactful than trimming the fat of your website content.
That’s all for today’s issue. As always, if you enjoyed this issue please let me know on Twitter: