Top 5 Web Psychology Principles To 10X Conversions

You build a super swanky new website and it looks the part, has all the information a user could ever want and makes your business sound like a great place. The only problem is, it’s not converting anyone.

You sit there wondering why? What did you do wrong? Do you need to add anything to the site? But I say, sit back, relax and read this blog to find out some potentially glaring problems you might have with your website.

Through the power of our simple brains and hacking that with psychology, you too can have a website with a 2000% conversion rate… well, maybe not that high, but it’ll be damn close!

So let’s get into our top 5 website psychology hacks to increase conversions.

Principle 1: Social proof

Imagine you are looking for the absolute best vegan egg, you have a look around a few vegan brand websites and see what they have to offer and on each I bet you look at their reviews. 

This is social proof.

It is showing your potential customers what other people think about you and your products. Which builds trust! After all, who is going to believe that your vegan eggs taste like real eggs if it’s only you saying it? No-one! 

Here are a few ideas to add some of that trust building social proof to your website (or not 😉):

• Customer reviews
• Award logos
• Brands that stock your product
• Brands you’ve worked with
• News outlets that have featured you
• INFLUENCERS!

Principle 2: Choice overload

Have you ever been in the supermarket and realised… There are too many options for vegan eggs?! 

I know, we’ve all been there. And what happens when you are faced with that? You freeze up, spend way too much time in that aisle and sometimes just walk away without even making a choice.

This is choice overload.

Also known as the paradox of choice, which if you follow us on Instagram you will already know all about, this cognitive bias kicks in when we are faced with too many choices.

So how does this relate to our website you ask?

It’s simple, the best thing to do is to keep your website simple. Here are a few ideas:

• Have fewer options in your navigation, try keeping it to 3 – 5.
• Reduce pricing options
• Group products and services together

Principle 3: Center-stage effect

This is a nice and simple one for you, a mid blog brain break lets say. We’ve all seen pricing pages before, they normally have 3 boxes with the middle one being bigger and bolder than the others.

But do you know why that is the trend on pricing pages? It’s because of the center-stage effect.

This effect has been tested and shown that when given three options, most of the time they will pick the middle one. Which means that not only should you follow these well practiced pricing page themes, but also you should make your middle offer the most rewarding financially. 

P.s. I’m racking my brain here trying to work vegan eggs in somehow… 

Principle 4: Presenter paradox

Back to those vegan eggs now. Say someone gives you a carton of vegan eggs, beautifully packaged and looking the part. Now say they gave you (unbenounced to you) the same eggs but in a basic plastic bottle and asked which you think are better.

You’d say the beautifully designed ones right? Even after tasting you would more than likely say the carton ones are better quality.

This is the presenter paradox.

It’s a problem because we are irrational beings at heart, even given the opportunity and information to make the best choice, our lizard brain kicks in and makes the decision for us based on ‘feeling’.

It’s also the same when presented with information, like copy on a website. When presented with a lot of information at once, our lizard brain takes over and we tend to make worse decisions.

Here’s a few ways to overcome this on your website:

• Keep your website SHORT and sweet
• Make sure your copy is PRECISE
• CUT out the fluff!
• List the BENEFITS
• Only show elements that are WORTH showing
• Offer secondary pages to users who WANT more information

Principle 5: Curiosity

Through this entire blog, you’ve probably wondered. What is the deal with this guy and vegan eggs? It may have hooked you into reading on further just to find out if I can keep the theme going.

This is how we use curiosity to drive conversions.

Curiosity is also why you came to this blog, you wanted to find out the top 5 psychology principles to increase your website’s conversions. It’s also the main driving force of clickbait and why it does so well.

Here are a few ways to use curiosity in your website:

• Use headlines that make the user have to read more
• Make call to action buttons copy that entices them to click
• Create quiz based content that rates the user in some way
• If you want to make sure your website is converting at its highest rate possible, get in touch for website review.