UX (User eXperience) design can have a significant impact on the conversion rate of a website - the rate at which visitors take actions on it that you want them to take, such as submitting an enquiry about the products or services provided. It influences the feelings a visitor has, and the behaviours they display as they move through your website - which in turn impacts on conversion actions.
What you count as a conversion may vary depending on your organisation's income streams, as well as who and what you are targeting. Submitting an enquiry form, purchasing a product, signing up to an email newsletter, listening to a podcast, watching a video or downloading a resource / white paper may all be actions that have value to you as a website owner. Ensuring the UX design of your site supports the conversion actions that are valuable to you is a key ingredient in a successful website.
What is UX Design?
UX Design can be defined as planning and executing design elements on a website that will inform, guide and attract the attention of visitors, and assist them in navigating the site to locate what they want as quickly and easily as possible.
Successful UX design incorporates a number of elements: easy to use navigation, not confusing the user with too many different options, accessibility (to make the site easier to use even with imperfect vision or other disabilities) and a clear and compelling user journey. Trust is built when a user can use a website in a way that suits them, rather than feeling forced to use it in a way that does not feel logical or sensible to them or where their navigation choices deliver unexpected results.
UX design is part of the overall design of your website. To learn more, please see our article The Complete Guide to Website Design for Business.
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What is a Website Conversion Rate?
'Conversion rate' refers to the percentage of users that take an action on a particular website. As mentioned, this could be filling out a contact form, signing up to a newsletter or making an e-commerce purchase.
Your website conversion rate can be calculated using the total number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors to the site, multiplied by 100. This calculation gives you the conversion rate percentage.
It is a good idea to monitor this figure every month, or whenever you are looking at your website statistics. This is will give a baseline conversion rate for your website that can be used for comparison following any UX changes or updates that are made to the site. It also helps let you know if the look and feel of your website is becoming dated and unappealing, if you see it tailing off over time.
Why UX design has an Impact on Conversion Rates
From the point that a visitor lands on a website, their experience of it - including every element they see - will affect their next action and whether they are likely to convert or not. Elements of UX design can have a psychological impact on the user, which in turn can then determine what action the user takes.
Examples of psychological factors of UX design that can impact conversions include:
1. Efficiency of navigation
The navigation of a website needs to be simple and clear. A user wants to be able to easily and efficiently locate what they are looking for. A confused, complicated navigation system can cause frustration, and result in a user navigating away from a site.
2. Immediate impression
A user will instantly form an opinion on a website based on how quickly the site has loaded and what it looks like. To reduce bounce rate, ensure that a satisfactory level of site-loading performance is maintained and that the site is visually appealing to anyone landing on it.
3. Clean, clear layout
Users are bombarded with content everywhere they look. A website that is busy or visually overwhelming is likely to place extra strain on the user's capacity to take in the site and mentally process it. A calm and concise site is more likely to win users over and encourage them to stay until they have taken a desired action.
4. Trust and reputation
A design that is professional and shows brand consistency (including with other touch points the user may come across in association with your brand) will enhance trust and build credibility. Adding reviews or a star rating that are immediately visible on the landing page, where relevant, can help to reinforce those positive signals.
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Key UX Design Elements that Improve Conversions
CTAs
Calls-to-action need to be clear and immediately obvious for the user. They can inform the user of the journey through your site that you would like them to take, which may change depending on your current goal for the website at any given time. Consider size, colour and spacing and the degree of contrast with other elements on the page, as those will influence the overall visual impact of a CTA and how successful it is.
Examples of CTAs include ‘Book your consultation’, ‘Get in touch’, ‘Explore the range here’, and ‘Get your free quotation’. An effective area for a CTA could be immediately after a section of text that the user has read, and now needs to know what next step they should take on your site. Use this opportunity to offer them immediate direction and encouragement can help them to convert. A lack of CTAs could result in a user not being incentivised to get in touch or find content you want them to see that will encourage them to convert.
Navigation
If the navigation of a site is complex or out of the ordinary, that can cause problems for a visitor, especially when they are used to certain conventions or styles of navigation and they have to stop and think about how to use your navigation. You risk losing that potential customer if what you have done causes confusion or uncertainty. Keep menus clear and sensible, minimise the pages and categories shown in those to the most useful and impactful, and assess the number of clicks it will take for a user to get to where they want to go or where you would like to direct them so they don't have to click more than three or four times to get there. Making it easy to navigate a site in order to maximise the chance of the user converting is always a good thing, whatever that conversion goal may be.
Page Loading Speed
A slow-loading website can have a very detrimental impact on the experience visitors have of that site. Most people expect a site to load almost instantly when they have clicked on it, with even small delays causing friction for impatient users. This friction can lead the user to abandon your site in favour of a competitor that offers a better experience, losing you the possibility of a conversion.
That’s why it is vital to ensure that your website loads quickly with a tool like Pagespeed Insights. Check images are optimised, compress styles and script where you can, and use techniques like lazy loading to keep delays from images, animation and video loading to a minimum.
Page load speed is also an important factor in both SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) with search engines and AI answer engines assessing your site for the potential to include it in SERPs and AI responses. These systems will display websites that they believe users will find most useful to their query or prompt. A slow loading website will not be considered as helpful for a user, hence search engines and answer engines are unlikely to feature sites that load slowly.
Mobile-friendly design
Recent data shows that 96% of the UK population are mobile phone users, equivalent to more than 66 million people. With this large number of potential website users, it is essential for your website to be built with mobile users (along with those viewing on a desktop or tablet) in mind.
A mobile device can be accessed at all hours, and offers a huge opportunity for businesses looking to build that initial connection with users that can later support and encourage conversions. It is almost unheard of for websites in 2026 not to be geared to mobile users but make sure you regularly check your site is working well on smaller screens.
Conversions, such as the purchase of a product or service, and be done with a single click on many mobile sites. A direct-to-checkout option lets customers buy a single product instantly as opposed to going through the cart process, and express payment methods such as ApplePay or GooglePay, bypass the need to add card and billing information and allow for quick and easy purchase.
Key principles of designing for mobile include ensuring simple navigation, optimisation of images to reduce load time, and design with one-handed operation in mind, such as including easy-to-reach elements for operation by a single thumb and ensuring an unfussy design in order to reduce cognitive load for the user.
Trust signals
Customer testimonials and reviews are trust signals that offer reassurance to users when they are navigating your site, along with accredited certifications. This is especially true if reviews are posted on review platforms that users recognise and trust, such as Google Reviews or Trustpilot, or the accreditations are well-known, such as Which? Trusted Trader.
These recognised standards reassure users that your website is legitimate and that it is safe to enter their personal details when converting or making a purchase. Without such trust signals, users may be suspicious as to whether the site is a real or fraudulent. If they are suspicious in any way, then they are less likely to convert. They will not want to risk giving away personal information to an unknown source, and will be more inclined to leave the site and continue browsing elsewhere.
UX Design Mistakes that Reduce Conversions
Simple mistakes within UX design can reduce conversions and ultimately impact of the successfulness of your website and business. These include:
- Over-complicated navigation
Keep it simple, clear and efficient with just a few easy-to-follow clicks leading to your goal conversion.
- Slow page speed
Review page speed using tools such as Page Speed Insights to check images are optimised, code is minimal and that there are no unnecessarily large design elements.
- Too much choice
Too many options have the potential to confuse users if they are looking for something specific. Offer them a clear route to follow to your target conversion that is relevant to your site, product or service.
- Poor mobile Experience
User experience and look and feel should be consistent across desktop, tablet and mobile devices to ensure that opportunities for conversions are not missed.
- Complicated Forms
Simplify forms, requesting only the most essential information required to maximise conversions, using 1-2 fields for newsletter signups and 3-5 fields for contact or quotation request forms.
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UX Design Best Practices for Improving Conversion Rates
- Use visual hierarchy
Use font sizing and colour to make the most important features clear and obvious to a user.
- Optimise product pages
Consider what product information a user would need to encourage them to convert or make a purchase.
- Improve search functionality
Make the search bar clear and visible, enable filters and offer autocomplete when users are searching, in order to remove friction.
- Guide users through a clear journey
Highlight the journey you want users to take on your site in order for them to reach your optimal conversion.
- Reduce form fields
Keep form fields to a minimum, to make it less off-putting and as easy as possible for a user to convert.
How UX Design Works with SEO
Search engines monitor many signals in order to determine the quality, relevance and usefulness of a website and its suitability for ranking in search results.
Some of these signals, such as bounce rate, time on page and Core Web Vitals (available in Google Search console) are directly impacted by the UX design of a site. If a site is designed with the user in mind and optimised for performance, so it offers an overall good experience, that will send a positive signal to search engines.
A search engine will then use this assessment along with other factors such as the relevance and quality of content and the behaviour of real people on your site to decide where to place your site within the rankings for a particular search query.
How to Elevate Your Website’s UX
Once you have ensured that the basics of good UX design are covered on your site, there are ways to review your site that can help to take your site’s UX to the next level.
Independent, external testing of your site can be completed in order to assess its usability and examine how the user actually navigates your site in real time. It is a good idea to request that testers note any features that are distracting or any issues they experience. This process can highlight areas that need improving or that may require extra work to reach a desired outcome.
Heatmap tools such as Microsoft's Clarity and Hotjar can also be useful to assess how users move throughout your site and highlight any sticking points they may encounter. You will be able to watch in real time or watch a recording of their movements and identify areas where they may linger or quickly move on. This will give helpful insight into areas of your site that might need clearer direction, the need for the introduction of a CTA, or elements that should be removed if any areas are proving overwhelming or create exit points.
Google Analytics (along with other tracking systems) can be very valuable to determine where users are entering and leaving the site and how they move from page to page. You can also gather information on how long users are spending on each page, and track where conversions are taking place. This will give you key insight into the areas of the site that are the most appealing and attractive to users and that are ultimately gaining those important conversions. Equally, it can allow you to identify areas that are not converting and how these differ from the more successful ones. Regularly reviewing this information means you can adapt the role the website plays as and when required, to suit user needs and trends.
A final method that can be used to refine your UX design is A/B testing. This involves the testing of different options, whether CTA wording, the colour of a button or the inclusion of a formal versus informal image on a contact page for example. You can split-test, or try the first option for a period of time and then try the second option for the same period of time and see which fared better. This will inform which option is best based on real data rather than a hunch, and can be especially beneficial if there are differences of opinion. Your developers can help with setting up split testing so that, in the same time period, different website users are randomly served different versions of a page or form, allowing you then to analyse which version performs best.
Conclusion
Users' experience of your website can directly impact on the success of your business, with high quality UX design having the potential to increase conversions significantly. Review the UX design of your website with your target user in mind and try to identify any areas of opportunity that could make for a smoother customer journey. It may be that relatively minor tweaks to the design would result in a marked bump up in engagement and conversions.
Please note our banner image for this article was created using ChatGPT.
