Learn the fundamentals of webpage optimization to brainstorm how you might optimize your site.
Goals are key for conversion rate optimization — which is the process of testing and refining your website to drive more visitor engagement against your most valued goals. In this guide, we'll cover how you might optimize individual webpages. Keep the individual visitor in mind as you experiment with different approaches to optimizing your website.
Pick the right optimization type
You can run personalization optimizations and test optimizations, or either as AI-optimized in Webflow Optimize. Consider all available optimization types as you read through the concepts outlined in this guide.
Manual personalizations — Sometimes setting rules that personalize your content for specific audiences is the best option (e.g., a localized phone number). To do this, you'd create a rules-based audience to target visitors with manual personalization optimizations. One pitfall to consider with rules is that it comes with the assumption that one thing is always going to be best for one audience. The reality is that visitors' interests and behavior can change.
Traditional tests — In other cases, you won't know which idea is best for which audience. This is where traditional tests can be good to run. You can simply generate some ideas and then run the test across a randomly assigned traffic split to see which ones perform best. This type of optimization can't be edited once launched to ensure the data remains accurate.
AI-optimized — In many cases, using the AI-optimized mode in either personalization or test optimizations is the best option. This mode combines the strengths of both optimization types and leverages AI to do all the heavy lifting, freeing you up to just generate ideas. AI automatically detects audiences and always shows the variations that yield the most conversions for each audience group based on their reactions. Add new variations to the pool of available variations at any time.
Generate a sense of serendipity
Imagine landing on a website and seeing the solution you were looking for showcased on the first webpage you see. It's such a relief not to have to go digging for the solution. What if you then saw social proof that your biggest competitor was already using this solution with great success?! What a happy coincidence… Maybe it was meant to be.
This sense of serendipity is what you should aim to create by leveraging what you know about each visitor. Prospects will be more likely to engage when things seem to line up beneficially, by pure chance.
All-knowing can seem off-putting
Leveraging integrations like 6sense and Demandbase (available with Enterprise plans) makes it increasingly easier to remove some of the anonymity from your visitors. You can leverage these integrations to target prospects directly. However, when a website appears all-knowing, it comes across as a little off-putting. Find the right balance.
Optimize the page so that the content the prospect sees directly relates to their situation but feels like a happy coincidence.
Aim to make roughly half the content prospect-specific and the other half related to the targeted industry, role, or solution. For example, if you have eight customer logos on the page, have four of them be the prospect's competitors and leave the other four related to the prospect's industry or role.
Repurpose the creative that you have
You don't have to reinvent the wheel to get started. We recommend leveraging what you've already created to get the ball rolling on generating variations. At the very least, you can use the data from these initial tests to determine where you should focus your future efforts. For example, you might pull copy/images/content from your existing:
- Email campaigns/engagement
- Advertisements
- Landing pages
- Case studies
- Logo farms
- Product/Industry/Role pages
Don't worry about trying something dramatically different
You'll never know if an idea is going to be top-performer without trying it out. We encourage you to think outside of the box and push beyond your comfort zone.
Leverage AI-optimized to test with a built-in safety net. Run every idea that you can think of without worrying about how that idea will land. The AI automatically starves underperforming variations of traffic and redistributes the traffic to variations that are performing better. If no variations are performing well, traffic is shown the base variation — i.e., the original page content.
Create tailor-made content based on what you know
Creating personalized variations starts with knowing something about your visitors that you can leverage. Optimize can then show these variations to targeted visitors based on the criteria you've defined (e.g. by solution, industry, funnel position, etc.).
Automatically detected traits
Optimize automatically detects certain visitor traits, like the device they use to browse your website or a general location based on their IP address. You can target these traits to refine what visitors see. For example, you might have one hero image for mobile visitors and a different hero image for desktop visitors.
Visitor behavior
You can learn what prospects are interested in by what they view and how they engage. Their behavior can also show you their interest level. Optimize automatically detects some behavior that you can target. For example:
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Pages viewed — A common use case is to leverage different solutions pages for your offerings. If a prospect visits a given solutions page, it might define their industry, role, or interests.
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Repeat visitor — If a visitor frequently browses your website (i.e., high sessions count), it often indicates a heightened interest. You can leverage this to show different types of content, like more aggressive messaging to contact sales.
Deanonymization services
Deanonymization services use reverse IP lookup to remove some anonymity from prospects who visit your website. Enterprise plans include a built-in solution, called enhanced match, and the option to integrate with 6sense or Demandbase.
These services provide details about the visitor before the webpage loads, which Webflow Optimize can use for targeting. Typically these services provide firmographic data (e.g. the visitor's company name, size, industry, revenue, location, etc.).
Other data sources
Enterprise plans can integrate with Salesforce, Marketo, or HubSpot. Leverage info that you've collected about your prospects in these services to tailor visitor experiences accordingly. For example, you might target visitors based on:
- Industry/role
- Company name
- Company's competitors
- Where the prospect is in the funnel
Meet the prospect where they are
Regardless of which page you are optimizing, always keep the prospect's journey with you in mind. Think about how you might engage with them based on where they are at that moment, literally and figuratively. Consider these questions:
- Where is this prospect on their journey with me?
- How can I address or treat them differently now at this stage of their path?
- What's worked in the past with prospects at this stage?
Where are they?
Every website is unique, so you may have several different points of engagement to consider. Some common examples include:
- Where are they in the funnel?
- How many times has this prospect visited the website? Or a specific page?
- What brought them to your site? Email campaign? Paid ad? Targeted Ad? Webinar?
How do I meet them?
Now that you've identified where they are, how do you meet them there? This depends on your business goals and what you know about them. The idea is to engage them with the appropriate tone and content based on the stage of their journey.
You might consider adjusting your tone and messaging based on:
- Where they are in the funnel (i.e. how invested/ready to convert they are)
- How many times they've visited the site (i.e. their interest level)
- Repeated actions on the site (e.g. repeated clicking a solutions page or case study)
- The path that led them to your site (e.g. targeted prospects may get VIP treatment)
- Company size or employee headcount (i.e. a smaller company interests differ from larger companies)
Simplify individual pages as well as the overall experience
Information overload - the struggle is real. Imagine looking for a quick answer on a webpage that is a wall of text. Do you stay on the page or do you bounce? More often than not, people respond more favorably to a clean, minimalistic design.
Avoid oversaturation — a common website theme more often than not is to pile up content in concentrated areas. Whether this is for a catch-all approach or an attempt to provide all the info they think visitors need to make informed decisions, this approach can feel overwhelming and daunting to sift through. Aim to strike a balance between showing enough content to get the targeted audience to engage, but not showing so much content that it has the opposite reaction.
General guidance — leverage AI-optimized optimizations when appropriate and AI will help you find the optimal balance that works best for your prospects as you try out different variations. Just remember as you build out your ideas that less is more and whitespace is our friend. Consider the following:
- Front-load what's important
- Reduce unnecessary clutter
- Filter visible content by what you know about the prospect
- Make the path to your objective obvious so they don't have to hunt for it
- Try running a test to see how a very minimalistic version of the page performs