Here’s How to Improve Conversion Rates in WordPress

Here's How to Improve Conversion Rates in WordPress

Your website’s conversion rate is terrible, but not for the reasons you think.

It’s not because you haven’t A/B tested the exact shade of Pantone blue on your call-to-action button. It’s not because you’re missing the latest whizz-bang animated social proof pop-up that promises to “skyrocket engagement.”

And it’s certainly not because you haven’t bought that new £70 “high-conversion” theme from ThemeForest.

Your WordPress site fails to convert visitors into customers because you’ve made it a confusing, slow, bloated mess.

You’ve cluttered it with distractions. You’ve buried the one thing you want people to do under layers of corporate jargon and pointless features. You’ve mistakenly added more stuff to add more value.

The advice out there is a circus of distraction. It’s all about fiddling at the edges. This isn’t about fiddling. This is about a fundamental rethink. This is about ruthless simplification.

First, Let's Be Honest About ‘Conversions'

Before we go any further, we need to be clear on our terms. The word ‘conversion' gets thrown around so much that it loses meaning.

What Are You Trying to Achieve?

A conversion is simply when a visitor completes a desired action. That’s it. It’s not some mystical marketing event.

For an e-commerce site, the primary conversion is a sale. Obvious. But for a B2B service business, it might be:

• A contact form submission.
• A request for a quote.
• A phone call was initiated from the site.
• A PDF brochure download.
• Signing up for a webinar.

You must define your single most crucial conversion goal for each key page. If you don't know the primary action you want a user to take, you can be sure they don't either. Confusion is the number one conversion killer.

Stop Asking “What's a Good Conversion Rate?”

This is the most common and the most useless question in the business. It’s like asking, “How long is a piece of string?”

A 0.5% conversion rate on a £50,000 consulting service might make you a millionaire. A 10% conversion rate on a free newsletter signup might be catastrophic if none of them ever buy anything.

The only benchmark that matters is your own. The goal is not to hit some arbitrary industry average pulled from a HubSpot blog post. The goal is to be better than you were last month. Focus on your numbers. The rest is noise.

The Unsexy Foundations That Trump All Gimmicks

You can have the most persuasive copy and the slickest design in the world. You're dead in the water if you get these three things wrong.

Nail Your Value Proposition (Or Go Home)

Here’s a simple test. Can you explain what you do, who you do it for, and what outcome they get in a single, clear sentence?

Not a paragraph of buzzwords. Not “synergistic solutions for a new paradigm.” A simple sentence.

• “We design logos for tech startups that make them look credible to investors.”
• “We provide a reliable plumbing service for homeowners in Manchester so they can fix leaks fast.”

Your value proposition must be the first thing people see and understand. It should be in your hero section, staring them in the face. It's the anchor for the entire visit. If a user has to scroll and click around for 30 seconds to figure out what you sell, they're gone.

Speed Isn't a Feature. It's The Entire Experience.

This is my biggest pet peeve. Business owners will spend weeks debating a logo placement but won’t spend a day on site speed. It’s madness.

Every fraction of a second your site takes to load, you are losing people. According to data from Google, the probability of a user bouncing increases by 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. By 5 seconds, it’s 90% [source].

Your visitors are not patient. They have 15 other tabs open. They will not wait for your oversized hero image to load.

Go to Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix right now. Put your URL in. If your mobile score is red, that is your biggest conversion problem. I guarantee it. Don't read another word of this article until you've done that. The truth might sting.

Your Mobile Site is Not a Shrunken Desktop Site

Over half of your traffic is on a mobile phone. Yet, most businesses treat their mobile site as an afterthought—a shrunken, compromised version of the “real” desktop site.

This is a catastrophic mistake.

A user on a phone is in a completely different context. They are likely distracted, using a thumb, and have zero patience for tiny text, hard-to-hit buttons, or complex navigation menus.

Your design process must be mobile-first. This doesn't just mean “it looks okay on a phone.” It means designing the experience for the mobile user from the ground up. The primary call-to-action should be reachable with a thumb. Forms should be brutally simple. Menus should be stripped back to the absolute essentials.

You've failed if a user can't accomplish their goal on your mobile site within 15 seconds.

Taming the WordPress Beast: Your Platform-Specific Problems

WordPress is brilliant. Its flexibility is why it powers over 40% of the web. But that same flexibility is its curse. It gives you enough rope to hang yourself, and most businesses do.

The Great Plugin Purge: When More is Less

Here’s a behaviour I see constantly. A business owner reads a blog post about a “must-have” feature and immediately goes to the WordPress plugin directory to install it. A slider plugin. It's a fancy font plugin—a “snowfall effect” plugin for Christmas.

Every single plugin you add is another chunk of code. It’s another potential security risk. It’s another thing that can conflict with other plugins. And most importantly, it’s another thing that slows your website down.

Here's a challenge: Go to your plugin list. Deactivate every single one that is not essential for the core function of your website. I’m talking about your form builder, SEO plugin, and caching system. Everything else? Deactivate it.

Your site will feel faster instantly. 90% of the stuff you removed added no real value anyway. It was just clutter.

Page Builders vs. Gutenberg: The Performance Trade-Off

Page builders like Elementor and Divi are popular for a reason. They make it easy for non-coders to create complex layouts. But this convenience comes at a steep price: performance.

These tools often generate bloated, inefficient code that can cripple your PageSpeed score. The more complex your design—with nested columns, fancy animations, and dozens of widgets—the slower it gets.

WordPress's native block editor, Gutenberg, is a different story. It's leaner and produces cleaner code, resulting in a much faster website. While it might have a steeper learning curve for those used to drag-and-drop, the performance gains are undeniable.

I'm not saying you must abandon your page builder. But you must be aware of the trade-off. If you use one, you must be obsessive about optimisation: use a lightweight theme, keep designs simple, and turn off unused widgets.

A New Theme Won't Fix a Broken Strategy

“I think we need a new theme.” This is the classic response when conversions are down. It's a way of avoiding the real work.

Your theme is just the container. It's the scaffolding. The problem is rarely the theme itself but what you put inside it. You can take the fastest, most lightweight theme globally and bring it to its knees with 10MB images, 50 active plugins, and a nonsensical site structure.

Instead of hunting for a “magic” theme, focus on your content, offer, and site speed. A simple, well-coded theme is all you need. The rest is up to you.

On-Page Fixes That Require Brains, Not a Budget

This is where the rubber meets the road. You can change these things today, which will have a genuine impact.

Write Like a Human, Not a Marketing Department

Stop using words like “leverage,” “synergy,” and “streamline.” Nobody talks like that in the real world. Your website copy shouldn't, either.

Write as you speak. Be direct. Be clear.

Your customer doesn't care about your company's mission statement. They care about their problem. Your copy should be focused entirely on them, their pain points, and how you solve them. Use “you” far more than you use “we.”

And for goodness' sake, use short sentences and short paragraphs. Vast walls of text are intimidating. White space is your friend. It makes your content scannable and easier to digest.

The Art of the Blindingly Obvious Call-to-Action (CTA)

Your CTA has one job: to tell the user exactly what to do next. This is not the time for subtlety or cleverness.

• Stop using “Submit.” A button should describe the outcome. Instead of “Submit,” use “Get Your Free Quote,” “Download the Ebook,” or “Book Your Discovery Call.”
• Make it look like a button. It sounds stupid, but I've seen countless websites with “buttons” just coloured text links. A button should be a solid, clickable-looking rectangle.
• Have one primary CTA per page. If you give people too many choices, they will choose none. This is called the paradox of choice. Decide the most important action for that page and make it the most prominent visual element.

Fix Your Damn Forms: The Conversion Killer You're Ignoring

Every field you add to a contact form reduces the chance of someone completing it. It's a direct correlation.

Look at your contact form right now. Do you need their phone number, company name, address, and how they heard about you, just for an initial enquiry? No, you don't. You're just satisfying your curiosity at the expense of a lead.

Ask for the absolute minimum you need to start a conversation. For most businesses, that’s a name and an email. That's it. You can gather the other details later.

Also, use clear labels above the fields. Don't put the label inside the field as placeholder text that disappears when the user starts typing. This is a usability nightmare, especially on mobile. Tools like Gravity Forms or Fluent Forms give you complete control over this.

How to Build Trust When You Have None

People buy from businesses they trust. Trust isn't built with a stock photo of smiling people in a boardroom. It's built with authenticity.

• Use real photos. Show your face. Show your team. Show your actual workplace. It proves you're a real entity, not some faceless dropshipping operation.
• Show specific testimonials. “Great service” is useless. A good testimonial describes the customer's problem, the solution you provided, and the particular result they got. Use their full name and photo if you can.
• Make your contact information obvious. A clear address and phone number show you're not hiding.
• Write a proper “About Us” page. Tell your story. People connect with people.

Building a trustworthy online presence is a cornerstone of professional web design. It's not just about aesthetics; it's about communicating credibility at every turn. If your site looks cheap or untrustworthy, you've lost before starting. This is a core part of professional web design services, not an optional extra.

Stop Guessing. Start Watching.

The most powerful insights don't come from spreadsheets. They come from watching real users interact with your website.

Data That Doesn't Lie: Heatmaps and Session Recordings

Stop obsessing over the bounce rate in Google Analytics. It tells you what happened but not why. For that, you need qualitative tools.

Install Microsoft Clarity. It’s free. It provides two invaluable things:

1. Heatmaps: These show you a visual representation of where people are clicking, tapping, and scrolling. You'll quickly see if people are clicking on things that aren't links or ignoring your primary CTA completely.
2. Session Recordings: This is the big one. You can watch anonymised recordings of actual user sessions on your site. Yes, watching someone struggle to find your contact page or fail to understand your navigation is often painful. But it is the fastest way to find and fix real-world usability problems.

I once watched three separate session recordings of users trying to click a headline on a client's site because its colour and style made it look like a link. It wasn't. We changed the colour. Form submissions on that page went up 20% overnight. You won't find that insight in Google Analytics.

A/B Testing: Why You're Probably Wasting Your Time

A/B testing, or split testing, is a powerful tool. But for 95% of small businesses, it's a complete waste of time.

You need thousands of conversions to get statistically significant results from an A/B test (e.g., changing a headline). Not visitors, conversions. Most small business websites simply don't have that volume of traffic.

You will learn far more and get results faster by making bold changes based on the qualitative data from session recordings and user feedback. Don't waste three months testing if a red button beats a green one. Find out why people aren't even getting to the button in the first place, and fix that.

The Truth of How to Improve Conversion Rates

Everyone is looking for a secret. A hack. A silver bullet plugin to improve conversion rates.

Here’s the truth: there isn't one.

The secret to improving your WordPress conversion rate is to stop adding things and start taking them away.

It's about having the discipline to make your website more straightforward, faster, and clearer. It’s about developing genuine empathy for your user and removing every single point of friction that stands in their way. It's about clarity of purpose.

Stop tinkering. Start cutting. Stop adding features. Start improving speed. Stop writing jargon. Start having a conversation.

If you’re tired of guessing and want an expert eye to find the real leaks in your website, then we should talk. We build sites that are designed for results from the ground up. You can request a quote here.

Those who want to keep digging into this stuff will find plenty more no-nonsense advice on our blog. Now, deactivate a plugin. I dare you.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Obsessing over this stuff is what we do. If you'd rather focus on running your business, look at our professional web design services. You’ll find more no-nonsense advice on our blog if you want to keep digging.