Creating Effective Calls to Action in Web Design
There are few feelings better than crafting a breathtakingly beautiful site. But great online experiences should be more than looks alone. To be effective, high-quality web design should also guide visitors toward a specific action or goal. And to do that, you need to create compelling calls to action (CTAs).
With effective CTAs, you can convert lookers into doers by driving user engagement and conversions. Thoughtful, well-designed CTAs can benefit sites across industries by:
Increasing clickthrough rates
Driving lead generation
Streamlining your marketing funnel
Improving the user experience
Overall, this helps your clients achieve their business goals by building larger communities, converting more customers, and generating higher-quality leads. Visitors typically go to a site to learn, purchase, or engage—and powerful CTAs show them the way.
With a little planning and a few web design strategies, it’s possible to craft effective CTAs on Squarespace. Here’s how:
Define clear objectives
When crafting a compelling CTA, it’s important to consider exactly what action visitors should take on each page or within each section. This knowledge informs decisions about placement, copy, and destination, matching visitor intent to create a seamless user experience.
Typically, visitors browse websites to find answers to their questions, learn more about products or services, or purchase an item. Based on their end goal, your client’s CTA should guide them toward an action like making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting a quote.
When CTAs align with specific user objectives, they’re more effective overall: increasing conversion rates, creating better leads, and generating more revenue. Plus, by matching user intent, sites become more clear, relevant, and consistent overall.
However, knowing the different types of objectives is important. During site visits, users are best defined as having:
Informational intent
These visitors are looking for educational material about a specific topic. They’re likely not trying to make a purchase and may not know much about your client’s site’s offerings, although they could be re-engaging with your client’s brand to learn more.
Typically, this traffic is at the top of your client’s marketing funnel and in the early stages of the buying process. These visitors may have landed organically for the first time through a search engine and are doing research related to your client’s brand.
You’ll want to use a CTA to encourage these visitors to read related content, download a guide, or sign up for a newsletter using a “subscribe” CTA. Once signed up, they can receive email marketing and continue to benefit from the great content, and your client can engage (or re-engage) them with marketing materials if they’re in your client’s target audience.
Commercial intent
These visitors are researching goods and services and looking to compare offerings or prices. They’re aware of your client’s business and thinking about purchasing, but aren’t yet sold.
These visitors are a little further down the marketing funnel, but want to learn about features, read reviews, and experience the brand. Your client’s site will inform their decision and should ideally encourage them to buy.
This traffic needs clear CTAs that create a simple path to purchase, book, or convert while you still have their attention. The CTA could take them to an ecommerce flow, scheduling tool, or quote request form. You can also include CTAs that offer downloadable resources or additional feature pages to provide more educational materials.
Transactional intent
These visitors are familiar with your client’s brand and know exactly how they want to convert. They’re familiar with the offering, have made a commercial decision, and want a quick path to get what they want.
Oftentimes, this visitor needs a very easy-access, always-present CTA in the page navigation, hero, or sidebar. This reduces the number of clicks they need to take to complete their transaction and limits drop-off.
Social intent
These visitors are familiar with your client’s brand and want to have continued interaction with their business and following. They may want to make a purchase, but they could also be in the research phase.
They need clear CTAs to direct them to join communities, follow on social, or engage with forums. This provides opportunities for them to engage with the website's content or customer network and can offer loyalty and trust benefits.
Designing compelling CTAs
In addition to matching intent, CTAs need to be visually appealing and attention-grabbing to effectively drive engagement. Think bold, on-brand, and eye-catching buttons, forms, and hyperlink text that scream “click me.”
Many Squarespace features designed to convert, like button blocks, form blocks, scheduling blocks, and newsletter blocks, are customizable to increase their effectiveness. With built-in design options like customizable colors, fonts, animations, and more, these components are versatile and customizable for your client’s visitors and can stand out while matching the look and feel of their site.
To provide clear paths for visitors and encourage engagement, create CTAs that visually stand out from your client’s typical page content. Some strategies include:
Use contrasting colors
Help your CTA stand out by using an alternative color to create strong visual contrast. Choose colors that are visually striking but still on-brand to keep the site cohesive.
Rely on bold typography
Draw attention to the CTA with large, bold fonts that make text prominent. Try different font styles, spacing, and weights.
Use whitespace
Create more focus on CTAs by leaving breathing room with negative space. Limit distractions and clutter by separating them from images or patterns.
Add icons or arrows
Reinforce action by using icons or arrows. These visual cues provide additional context and encourage engagement with the CTA.
Adjust size, shape, or style
Design CTAs to be larger and bolder to make them more visually interesting. Subtle changes to size, shape, and style can help catch visitors’ eye.
Add animations or effects
Make CTAs memorable and attention-grabbing by using effects like hover states and transitions. Use them sparingly, though, as they can affect the user experience en masse.
Placing CTAs strategically
Selecting purposeful locations for calls to action is another essential piece of their success. By placing them at pivotal moments in the visitor journey and in areas of high focus or interest, you can increase the likelihood of engagement.
To choose locations for CTAs, consider the user flow of the page and select key places of attention for the visitor, like the end of a section or next to critical page content. These areas make for natural jumping-off points for action that preserve the site’s narrative, reducing friction caused by illogical sequencing.
Many conversion-driven websites typically take a varied approach to CTAs and place them in multiple places on pages. While the exact location depends, brands typically have calls to action:
Above the fold
On high-value or high conversion intent pages, websites will have a button in the hero section that it’s visible on page load without scrolling. This prime location increases the accessibility of purchase or demo options and provides action opportunities for those that are eager to convert.
Within page content
For a more subtle approach, designers place CTAs integrated throughout page content with hyperlinks. This enables visitors to find more information elsewhere on the site that’s related to the subject they’re interacting with. These CTAs should be contextually relevant and provide value.
At the end of relevant sections
Many sections will also have a CTA at the end that encourages an action related to the segment’s subject matter. The end of a section is a natural action point for visitors, so CTAs offer visitors a deeper dive into its content or a conversion opportunity.
In some cases, websites will use a UX technique known as progressive disclosure, gradually introducing increasingly prominent action queues as the page continues. At the start of the content, users are presented with simple, small hyperlink CTA. Further down, they may encounter a small button. And at the end, they may see a large, attention-grabbing CTA. This technique encourages visitors to digest the page’s content before introducing action opportunities.
Learn more about effective content layout designs.
Crafting persuasive copy
Copy is another crucial piece of crafting compelling CTAs. Strong web copywriting can persuade visitors to take action and convert by promising value, inspiring confidence, and creating a sense of urgency. High-quality CTA copy should not only communicate what action visitors are taking but also what they can expect to receive after they click.
Great copywriting for CTAs creates more engaging brand narratives, longer visitor sessions, higher conversion rates, and more informed leads. Unclear or passive text results in higher bounce rates, shorter user journeys, disjointed experiences, and more abandoned conversions.
To write strong CTA copy, consider these tips:
Write clearly
Create copy that's simple to digest and free of jargon. Visitors should know exactly what will happen when they click to create a natural user flow. Avoid repeating too much ambiguous or directional language like “click here,” “submit,” or “learn more.”
Stay concise
Limit your link or button copy to a short phrase of no more than four words. This makes CTAs highly skimmable and limits potential distractions that could otherwise affect conversion rates.
Create action
Incorporate strong, punchy language into the CTA. Rely on action verbs like “get,” “read,” “find,” “learn,” “discover,” “shop,” “book,” and “join” to create natural movement to the next step.
Communicate value
Use language to tell visitors how they’ll benefit by clicking on the CTA. They could gain new knowledge (stay informed), solutions for a business problem (get more leads), or a conversation with a real-life sales rep (talk to a human).
Stress urgency
In some cases, implying a window of opportunity in CTAs can entice visitors to click through at higher rates. This positions your action as a limited-time feature and creates fear of missing out for visitors.
Get personalized
If you can track user data, use that info to create personalized CTAs wherever possible. Grab your visitors’ attention by addressing them by name, referencing past actions, or targeting their interests.
Monitoring and analyzing CTA performance
To create truly compelling CTAs, track their performance over time, interpret the data, and continuously experiment to optimize. Instead of making changes by instinct alone, a data-driven approach enables you to improve CTAs by watching their influence on user behavior.
By making calculated, incremental optimizations to CTAs using performance metrics, you can positively affect revenue and engagement metrics for the site. This can help clients reach business goals or achieve their growth targets.
Take a data-driven approach to improve CTAs by:
Tracking metrics
Start by looking at website analytics to create a performance benchmark for individual pages and the site as a whole. Most commonly, website managers track these numbers over a 28-day or quarterly period to get a full picture and reduce outliers. Depending on your client’s industry, it may be important to take seasonality or market factors into account.
Common key performance indicators for CTAs are:
Conversion rate
The percentage of visitors that completed an action on a website, like a purchase, download, or form fill.
Clickthrough rate
Also known as form and button conversions in Squarespace analytics, this is the percentage of visitors that clicked on a CTA button or link compared to the total number of visitors that saw the CTA.
Time on page
The average amount of time visitors spend on a page before or after clicking a CTA.
Bounce rate
The percentage of visitors that leave a page without interacting with any other elements after clicking on a CTA.
Squarespace analytics makes website data available for you and your clients. The feature surfaces metrics for specific pages or the site and shows performance across several key performance indicators (KPIs) and ecommerce KPIs.
Making a hypothesis
With these numbers in hand, you can interpret the data and optimize your client’s site by looking for positive and negative performance trends at the page level. You can use this data to deduce why certain CTAs have greater engagement or increased conversion rates. You can also identify which pages are struggling in comparison to the site’s average.
When optimizing performance, it can be helpful to consider the following:
What differentiates one high-performing CTA from another
Where users are bouncing from your pages
What content elements (e.g., design, copy, placement) is most engaging
What friction points exist between the page and visitor intent
For example, a page with a dramatically higher conversion rate than other related pages may be the only one with a CTA button above the fold. The page’s CTA is likely meeting the user intent, so you may try an above-fold button on another similar page and watch changes in conversion rate over time.
You don’t need a trend line to make a hypothesis—you can also develop a theory and run with it. Try testing more action-driven copy, more eye-catching button colors, or high-profile placement changes, and watch your results.
Analyzing performance
With your changes live on the page, keep an eye on your CTA performance compared to the page’s previous benchmarks. Look for percentage changes over a similar period of time, and be aware of other factors (i.e., promotions, social campaigns, marketing efforts) that can influence results.
Sustained positive improvements in metrics will label the CTA improvement a success, whereas negative impacts will take it back to the drawing board. No improvement, otherwise called “do no harm,” empowers you to choose a winner based on brand fit, preference, or long-term goal.
Whether or not your CTA test is a winner, you can take these learnings to other pages on the site, making subtle changes and watching the impact over time. Try to only have a few experiments running at once, avoiding any overlap to limit skewed results.
By continually refining your CTA approach, you can turn a site into a conversion powerhouse that drives growth for clients. Plus, you can take those learnings to other projects, launching sites with strong conversion rates from the start.
Crafting effective CTAs with Squarespace
By applying these web design strategies, you can craft CTAs that connect visitor intent with action, affecting conversion rates and revenue as a result. This can create more natural web experiences, better projects from launch, and happier clients overall.
To turn more lookers into doers on your Squarespace site, use the built-in tools to adjust your CTA placement, design, and copy so that it drives user action. Once it’s all in place, rely on analytics and thoughtful testing to create great CTAs that can’t be ignored.
Want more?
Check out Squarespace Circle, Squarespace’s program for professional web designers, developers, digital entrepreneurs, and creatives. Along with exclusive content, discounts, and other perks, Circle brings professionals together from across the globe to exchange advice while connecting with new clients and collaborators.
