Small design changes that turn more visitors into customers

Change the button colour, someone told us once. That was the entire brief. It rarely works that way. Website conversion is usually a handful of small, specific things, not one big fix. But a few beliefs about what those things are keep getting in the way.

Belief: a full redesign is the only way to fix low conversion

When a website isn't converting, the instinct is to scrap it and start over. New look, new structure, new everything.

In practice, a full redesign is slow, expensive, and often fixes problems you didn't have while introducing new ones. Most of the time, the issue sits in one or two specific spots: a confusing checkout step, a product page missing the one detail people need before they buy, a contact form that asks for too much. Fix those first. You'll usually see the effect faster than a redesign would ever deliver it, and you keep everything that was already working.

Belief: the homepage is where you win or lose the customer

The homepage gets the most design attention, the most meetings, the most opinions. It's the page everyone on the team looks at.

But most visitors don't land there. They come in through a Google search result straight to a product page, a landing page from an ad, or a specific service page. Those are the pages doing the actual selling. If your homepage is polished but your product pages are an afterthought, you're optimising the wrong door.

Belief: more choice helps people decide

It feels generous to offer options: three shipping methods, five pricing tiers, a dozen product variants right there on the page.

More choice usually means more hesitation. People don't compare carefully, they stall, leave the tab open, and don't come back. A clear default option with one or two alternatives, clearly explained, tends to get more people through than a full menu of choices they now have to research themselves. If you're not sure which option most people should pick, that's worth fixing before you add more options.

Belief: a bigger, brighter button will fix it

Button colour tests get a lot of attention because they're easy to run and easy to talk about. Red outperformed green, therefore red wins, forever.

In reality, colour is one of the smallest levers you have. What matters far more is what the button says, where it sits relative to the information someone needs to feel confident, and what happens the second after they click it. A bright orange button that leads to a confusing three-page form will still lose people. A plain button that leads to a short, clear next step won't.