The effect of design on conversion rate

One of the cool things about doing both client work and having side businesses is being able to use the side businesses as a testing ground and data source. Client work still makes up the majority of my income, but I’ve learnt some cool shit from having side businesses.

Here’s an example of that.

I launched Freelance Total in June last year. The initial public facing web design was pretty crappy; a template that I designed myself quite a few years ago that I had sitting round. Then, in August, I changed the site to use the feature pitch theme from Woothemes. Then, at the end of December, I changed the theme to Optimize, also from Woothemes.

Here’s how they all converted. (I’m counting signups to the trial as the conversion rate)

Jun-Aug - 1.26% conversion rate

Sep-Dec - 3.16% conversion rate

Jan-Feb - 4.15% conversion rate

There are other factors than just the design that went into the conversion rate increasing. I didn’t test these individually, but some of the things I did was:

• In v3, I took out the “Choose plan” page. Instead, people were signed up to the basic plan, and they could choose their plan once they were in the application
• Simplified the signup page – took out a bunch of stuff that wasn’t needed
• The feature tour was improved at various points
• I did some testing using Google Website Optimizer on the signup page
• Traffic was coming from different places. When I first created the site, it got a lot of initial traffic from being reviewed on a few app sites. I’m not sure if that adversely affected the conversion rate.

Because of the factors I mentioned above, and other factors beyond my control, I’m not sure I can make any scientific conclusions. But I think it confirms what many people (especially designers) think is obvious (I don’t happen to think it’s obvious), and that is, that better looking design leads to better results… at least in the freelancer industry.

I’ve had a similar experience with another side business – PHP Credit Card, though I don’t have the figures as easily available, and that also had price changes that affected conversion rate. Maybe I’ll write about that one another time.

Cheers,

Luke

P.S. Don’t try signing up for Freelance Total right now (April), you won’t be able to. We’ve sold it and are currently in the process of changing the accounts and licensing system.

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