Your website might be stunning and really interactive, but does it convert?

Beautiful designs are a really interesting feature to have on your website and they can even make your site stand out among your competitors. Unfortunately, that beautiful design can also make it difficult for your customers to figure out where they’re supposed to click.

Simple website designs, on the other hand, reduce clutter and distractions and pull your customer’s attention to where it matters most: your call to action.

In this post, I share reasons why simple designs are better for conversions as well as tips on how to simplify your design.

1. Reducing Web Design Elements Draws More Attention to Your Call to Action

Do me a favor and have a quick scroll through Awwwards’ Sites of the Year page for best website designs.

The designs are stunning, and if you actually visit some of them, they’ll have a lot of interactive elements that move and expand as you scroll down the page or hover over elements.

But notice what draws your attention first in a lot of these designs. It’s probably not a page’s primary call to action (CTA), AKA the purpose of a web page.

Instead, your eyes are drawn toward the large typography these sites use as well as their big, bright, and bold imagery.

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It’s a wow factor that can truly impress your customer and encourage them to interact with your website.

But the longer it takes customers to find the information they need, the more likely they are to leave and visit another website. Probably your client with a plain Jane design and a CTA readily available to click as soon as you visit their website.

How to Draw More Attention to Your Call to Action

Use a hero section at the top of your landing page.

A hero section has a heading and call to action at minimum. It sometimes also has a subheading, a short paragraph, and an accompanying image.

Use a simple background.

A plain color background or a color background with some kind of pattern would be best. If you want to use an image background, make sure it doesn’t draw attention away from your call to action.

Isolate your call to action.

You don’t always have control over this due to the nature of responsive designs, but try not to place your CTA button in a spot that rests on top of a distracting element, such as an object in a background image.

Use contrasting colors.

The best way to draw more attention to your CTA is by using contrasting colors, which are colors that are the direct opposite of one another, almost like an antonym.

So, if one shade is bright, the other shade should be dark to create contrast.

For example, if your background color is a dark blue, your CTA button should be white, pink, bright green, yellow, orange, etc.

It should not be black, gray, dark purple, or a similar shade of blue, all of which are difficult to see on a dark blue background.

Example: Our landing page on wpXPRESS.

Here’s our landing page on the wpXPRESS homepage as an example:

You can see we have a heading, a paragraph, a CTA button, a gradient background that elegantly transforms from white to light blue, and simple graphics that only slightly animate as you scroll.

Our CTA is in navy blue, and it sits atop a white background, making it stand out.

2. Simple Website Designs are Easier to Optimize for Mobile

According to StatCounter, 60.02% of all internet traffic around the world occurs on mobile devices.

This means that no matter where potential customers discover your website, be it Google or a social media platform, there’s a 60% chance that they’ll be on a mobile device.

This also means that it’s crucial for you to design your website in a way that’s optimized for mobile as much as it’s optimized for desktop.

A stunning web design doesn’t mean much when 60% of your customer base will view your website on a small screen.

With that said, it’s much easier to optimize a website for mobile if its original design is quite simple.

Instead of figuring out how you’re going to condense your large, beautiful image into a portrait-mode screen, you can code your website in a way that makes it responsive so that it resizes itself to the correct size automatically.

Customers will be happy that they’re able to browse your site just fine from whatever device they’re using, and you’ll see higher conversions as customers are able to complete purchases without having to set their phones aside.

How to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices

The easiest way to do this is to use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Wix, then install a theme or template that’s confirmed to be responsive.

This means your site resizes itself automatically “in response” to whatever screen size your visitor is viewing your website from.

You can also shorten paragraphs, use portrait-size images whenever possible, limit popups and ads, and make sure buttons and links are easy to click.

If you want to implement any of this manually or do custom work that optimizes your site for mobile devices, hire a developer.

3. Consumers Care More About Performance Than Style

They may not express it outwardly, but when it comes down to it, performance will always be more important than style to consumers.

A stunning web design means nothing if customers can’t access your website because it won’t load or scrolls way too slowly.

If customers can’t access your website, they also can’t convert.

And while having a beautiful website design doesn’t always necessarily mean your website will be slow, it’s better to use a simpler design that’s guaranteed to give you a much better speed score.

How to Optimize Your Website for Speed

Along with a simpler website design, you can use the following tricks to improve your site’s performance:

• Upgrade your hosting environment, such as by switching from a shared host to a cloud or VPS host
• Switch web hosts. Some web hosting servers are more efficient than others
• Implement server-side caching. A decent web host will do this for you
• Implement page caching. Certain hosts do this for you. Otherwise, you can use third-party solutions. Popular solutions for WordPress sites include WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache, and LiteSpeed Cache
  • These plugins will also help you improve performance in other ways, such as by minifying CSS and enabling gzip compression
• Use a plugin like Perfmatters to reduce HTTP requests and implement other performance optimizations
• Use a content delivery network (CDN)
• Compress images before you upload them to your website

4. Simple Designs Prevent Decision Fatigue

Decision fatigue is a phenomenon that describes how website visitors are less likely to click through to additional pages on your website because the original page they visited has too many elements to click on.

The phenomenon states that by having too many options to pick from, the consumer winds up choosing no option at all.

To prevent this phenomenon from occurring, try to use a maximum of five choices whenever possible.

This includes CTAs and pricing plans.

For CTAs, it’s best to use one or two buttons at a time. For pricing plans, one to five options will do, but typically, three is the golden rule.

Try to keep your primary navigation menu simple as well.

You really only need the following menu items:

• Home
• Services
• Pricing
• About
• Resources
• Contact

Some of these can be dropdown menu items that include additional items.

For example, your Resources menu item can include links for your blog, ebook guides, and help docs.

If you own an ecommerce website, try to keep product variations simple as well.

You can do more than five variations, of course, but if you’re putting dozens of variations on some of your products, you might want to consider separating these products into a few different listings.

For example, if you have a button-down, long-sleeve shirt that comes in solid colors, stripes, and patterns, create one listing for the solid colors, one for the stripes, and a third for the patterns.

If you only offer this shirt in solid colors, create one listing for neutral colors and another for vibrant colors.

Not only will this make for a cleaner product page design, it’ll reduce the decision fatigue potential customers face when they want to buy a product from you.

5. Simple Web Designs Allow Leads to Enter Sales Funnels More Efficiently

Finally, if you reduce web design elements on your page and simplify the number of choices customers have to make, any lead who visits your website will enter your sales funnel a lot easier than if you had a more complicated website design.

You’ve reduced needless design elements, you’ve made your website faster, you’ve reduced the number of options available to your customer, and you’ve optimized your site for mobile.

Now, all that sits between your customer and your sales funnel is the right offer and the right button color (believe it or not).

You can also do the following:

• Make your website easier to navigate
• Simplify form designs
• Use form designs that ask one question at a time
• Hire chat-based sales staff so customers can ask questions before they purchase