Your website can be attractive, flashy, and modern, but if it's not converting your leads, how useful is it?
Luckily, there are various available tools you can use to help you develop a website that is both aesthetic and effective. In other words, a website that converts.
Choosing the right website-building tool is a challenging and vital task. The right move can explode your ability to convert more leads and grow your business, while the wrong decision can cause you to waste money driving leads to a website that won’t convert. But how do you know how to make the right decision? That’s where we come in.
This post will provide you with a list of our top recommended tools for creating a high-conversion website that will enable your business to grow.
6 Best Tools for Creating a Website that Converts
Before diving in, it’s important to note the elements of a website that lead to conversions. After all, if you don’t know what you’re trying to influence, how are you going to make an impact?
Depending on your industry and target market, there are many different website conversion strategies, but the sites all have a few things in common. These things are:
- Clarity: Is your offer clear? Does someone know within seconds of visiting your landing page what you’re offering and why it’s special?
- Speed: Speaking of knowing something within seconds, how fast does your page load? 40% of people will bail on a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. It doesn’t matter how attractive your website is if almost half of your leads will never see it.
- Optimization: Are you willing to consult user data and go through multiple iterations of your landing page or website to make sure your page is as effective as it can be? I hope so because if not, you’re in the wrong place.
Now that we have a basis of the elements we’re looking at, let’s examine some of the tools that can help us keep our finger on the pulse of our website and elevate it to the next level.
HubSpot Website Grader is a tool you’ll want to use at the very beginning of your optimization process and one you’ll want to revisit as you make changes and improvements to your website.
To use this tool, all you will need is the URL of the webpage or landing page you are looking to optimize and an email address. Once you have provided these two pieces of information, the Website Grader will get to work!
This tool will grade your website on four different metrics:
- Performance: What is your page speed? Load time? Your page size? This tool can tell you all of these numbers.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The tool combs your page index, meta descriptions, and more to tell you how well you are utilizing SEO on your website.
- Design: Is your font legible on desktop? How about on mobile? The Website Grader can give you warning signs when your design is failing you.
- Security: How secure is your website? If you have eCommerce, are you using HTTPS? This tool can let you know how your site ranks when it comes to security.
Why is this helpful? The metrics provided by this grader show you the parts of your website that need improvement. This can allow you to take a more targeted approach to optimize your site.
Remember when we told you that almost half of your website visitors would abandon ship if the page takes more than three seconds to load? If you aren’t sure how your website performs on all devices and platforms, it’s time to check out Google PageSpeed Insights.
Google PageSpeed will examine your page load times and give you a score from 0-100 for how your website performs on both mobile and desktop. Google breaks this score into four categories, First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This breakdown lets you see exactly where your website’s current sticking points are. If your site scores 90 or above, it is considered good. Anything from 50 to 90 needs some adjustments, and if you score below 50, you know you need to make significant changes.
PageSpeed Insights are free, so there’s no reason not to start checking these out immediately and using them to improve the performance of your website.
Do you know for sure that you’re getting folks to your website, but for some reason, they are stalling out before they convert? Heat maps are one of the leading solutions to this problem. They allow you to identify the points of friction on your website that need fixing.
Lucky Orange provides you with heat maps so you can see where users are pausing, clicking, and bailing on your website. Once you know where visitors are getting confused or frustrated, you’ll better know where to target your optimization efforts.
This tool also provides form analytics, so you can see exactly where in the process of completing your landing page sign-up form your customers are abandoning your website. You can also set up polls on your website to get user feedback directly from visitors and get a dashboard so you can see all your analytics in one place. Lucky Orange also integrates with HubSpot, allowing you to see individual user data in that user’s contact record, which can provide helpful insights to marketers and sales teams alike.
When we think about our marketing efforts, we want to focus on the customer or target market, right? Absolutely! But if we’re keeping SEO in mind, there is a third party that all businesses operating in the digital space need to keep in mind. Google. If what Google thinks of our website matters so much, why don’t we just ask them what they think of it?
Using Google Analytics is one way to do just that.
Google Analytics is a tool that can help you track your visitors’ activity, such as average session duration, average pages per session, and bounce rate, or the number of people leaving your site without taking action. You can then pair this data with information about the traffic source in question. Traffic source information includes both geographic location and the path the visitor followed to get to your website in the first place.
This data can be beneficial if you’re also planning to use Google Ads, as it integrates with that tool to provide information on your online campaigns through Google. Like PageSpeed Insights, this tool is free to anyone with a Google account, so get analyzing!
Unlike the other tools in this article, HubSpot’s 8 Week CRO Planner isn’t a website integration or an analytics tool - it’s an educational tool. Of all the tools listed here, if you are new to Conversion Rate Optimization, this is the tool you should check out first.
The CRO Planner is essentially a DIY guide for creating a website that converts. Inside, you’ll find information on the following:
- Conducting a conversion rate audit
- Constructing and prioritizing hypotheses
- Identifying points of friction in your conversion funnel
- Understanding why users do what they do on your website
- And more.
The CRO Planner is designed to help you learn to use conversion rate optimization to grow your business in 60 dedicated days. You can download it for free here.
The five tools we have discussed so far can help you examine the performance of your current website, and plan for the changes you need to make. This final tool will allow you to actually build that beautiful, high-conversion website.
Sprocket Rocket is a modular website builder that lets users construct their website from pre-designed blocks. Not only is this far faster and easier than coding a website from scratch, but Sprocket Rocket has already proven that each module is capable of performing. No-fuss website building that gets results? Yes, please.
This tool is also optimized for Google Core Web Vitals and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee and 100 days of bug support. To sum up, Sprocket Rocket is the tool that will let you take the rest of the tools in this article and run with them toward a website that can help your business grow.
How Can These Tools Help You Create a Website that Converts?
The tools and resources outlined in this article will give you a leg up when it comes to optimizing your website for lead conversion. Still, if you're interested in taking your conversion rates to the next level, you may want to consider working with an outsourced growth team. Our team works with Sprocket Rocket, one of the tools outlined above. Read more about how we work to see if we might be a fit for your website design needs.
