How to significantly improve a website with small changes
Every week I will pick a website and try to redesign it to boost conversion. I don’t want to do any drastic changes, I will just try to improve what is already on the page. This week I’m going to focus on Plenty Of Fish (POF), a popular dating website. Here’s a screenshot of the homepage.
Let’s try to improve this page, step by step.
Navigation
Most of the links you can see on the top of the page bring you to an empty login page. So these links are mostly useless and they can distract visitors from the main thing they should be doing: either login or register. So let’s simply remove the navigation bar from the page. I just kept the top black bar and realigned the three links in it.
I also removed the login box below the navigation because there’s already a “sign in” link in the top menu.
Headline
When looking at a webpage, it should be obvious what it’s about and why it’s interesting. In this case I have to read some tiny text at the top to understand this, which is far from ideal. That can be fixed by adding a big and clear headline.
For the main headline I choose something that makes it obvious that it’s a dating website. For the sub-headline I used the old text that explains why this website is different and interesting.
Form
The form to make people register to POF needs a lot of attention because that’s the main thing visitors should be doing on this page. I like that it’s highly visible on the page with the headline, the blue background and the flashy call to action. However there are also a few things that I don’t like about it:
- The headline has nothing to do with the “register” part
- The “50,000 signups” seems fake, because it’s a round number
- Some fields are unnecessary or can be asked later in the registration process
- There are problems of alignments and margins
- The call to action “continue” is weak
Here’s what I came up with.
Side Bar
It’s a really good idea to showcase a few of the members on the homepage, showing faces on a dating website makes a lot of sense. But design-wise this can be improved, so I made a few cosmetic changes (margins, colors) and deleted the last profile.
Footer
If people are reading the bottom of the page, it means they are still not sure if they should register. That’s why the goal should be to convince them that POF is right for them with strong augments. So I replaced the tiny text by 3 bold claims that should help visitors create an account if they have doubts.
And now that the page has become a lot shorter, repeating the call to action at the bottom is not very useful. So I removed it to have the button “meet singles now” really stands out.
Final Result
To put things into perspective, here’s the page before and after the redesign. You can click on the image to make it bigger.
So what do you think? Which version is more likely to make you create an account?
There are still a lot of things that could be improved, but overall the new page looks more professional, is shorter, and makes things more obvious for the visitors. The changes I made are actually quite small, but should increase the number of people who register, and ultimately generate more profit for Plenty Of Fish. Note that all of these changes should be A/B tested to make sure they are actually good.
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