When it comes to websites today, one thing is a fact – it tends to be quite a task to gain and retain traffic that is relevant to your business. Everyone is constantly thinking, discussing, and working on ways that they can gain new visitors while keeping the old ones around. Valuable traffic and high visibility are very important, but it is without a doubt essential to pay attention to your conversion rate. You must always keep analyzing it and optimizing your website so that it is (more than) satisfactory. It is a measurement of how many people visit your site and take an action which affects your bottom line.

SEO and UX are crucial for your website’s performance, but in order to get the best out of the combination of those two factors, you need to focus on your web design and the psychology behind it. When it comes to the latter, you don’t really need to be a certified psychologist in order to understand some of the essential principles that make your audience tick and bring you the results that you are after. And yes, while color psychology is one of the crucial aspects, there is a large number of other principles that you should focus on.

The rule of thirds

One of the most well-known principles, stemming from photography, is the so-called rule of thirds. What you basically need to do is make sure that your page is visually divided into thirds, both from the vertical and horizontal perspective. What you get are nine identical rectangles. The rule says that the four intersections that lie in the middle are where people pay the most attention to. So, obviously, this is where you need to put your most important page elements.

The best way is to place the navigation bar outside this area. It is supposed to be of help, not the main focus. The crucial aspects are CTAs, which are supposed to make your visitors convert. Of course, the rule of thirds isn’t something to be taken too strictly. It is just a great help in terms of placing items on your page according to how visible you want them to be.

The matter of authority

Authority is actually a very important factor online. It means that people will most commonly trust proven experts and professionals who have an authoritative role in a particular field. You can see this in the world around us as well. People will listen to big media sites, doctors, celebrities, and so on.

This is why your website needs to show off that you are to be trusted, according to all your collaborations, sponsors, satisfied customers, and the like. You need to include a bar on your page that lists all of your affiliates. Also, you need to include various testimonials that work as social proof of your competence. Next to the names and photos of valuable customers and influencers, you should implement various quotes that praise your product or service.

The law of past experiences

What you must always keep in mind when designing your website is that neither of your visitors is a tabula rasa. Everyone has past experiences, and therefore a set of expectations that are deeply ingrained. This law is also known as the concept of mental models. It basically means that everyone tends to interpret current situations according to what they have experienced in the past.

Now, implementing this law into web design isn’t an easy task, due to the fact that such experiences are very often extremely personal, which means that something that works for one visitor will mean nothing to another. There is also the fact that no matter the fact that some experiences are deep-rooted, others aren’t such a big influence and are actually something that the brain will overcome quickly according to a new set of expectations that it creates.

The level where this law is most essential is actually the basic one. If one has a notion that a chair is meant for sitting, it is hardly something that anyone can change. It is somewhat similar to web design aspects such as CTAs. No matter how creative you want to be, people usually expect the CTA next to a certain product to say “Add to cart”. If you strain too far from this notion, your visitors will be confused, and there is a high probability that it will decrease your conversions.

Fitts’ law

Listening to the insight shared by the guys from the renowned web design agency in Sydney, you will know how much the loading speed of your pages has an effect on conversions. However, you should also consider the time that it needs for a user to take a particular action. This is what Fitts’ law is all about. It says that the time that is necessary for a user to move the mouse to a particular target area depends on two factors – distance and size.

Most commonly, the proper application of this law is using CTAs instead of text, making them large enough, and placing them near the mouse location where the user expects them to be. On the other hand, you can make actions that you don’t want the user to make less prominent and place them near the bottom of the page in the form of text.

In Summation

Psychology and web design are very closely connected. By applying some of the essential principles (such as the ones discussed in this article), you will be able to significantly improve your conversions. While web design trends tend to come and go, there are certain laws and principles that will, no matter how much the whole process evolves, remain as relevant as ever.