Noah Kagan, Sumo
“Be extremely intentional with the visible space on your website. It’s PRIME space. Instead of a fancy stock photo, use a clear CTA to generate leads or sales. Last but not least, keep testing different calls to action to improve the end results.”
If you’re not familiar, the term “above the fold” refers to the portion of the site that is visible without scrolling, a legacy of the newspaper era. As you can imagine, discussions about the importance of this area have been going on for many years.
The visible space “above the fold” remains canada phone number sample incredibly important, especially on key pages like landing pages, pricing pages, checkout pages, and other main pages of your ecommerce site. A study by the Nielsen Norman Group found that, on average, users engage 84% more with information located above the fold than with information located below. This is impressive, considering the ever-changing landscape. For example, with the rise of mobile devices, this space has completely transformed.
As you can see, best practices are not inherently bad. In fact, they can be a good starting point, as Peep mentioned at the beginning of the article. But it is important to understand the why behind them.
For example, you'll read that people don't scroll, so all your important information should be above the fold. That's inaccurate. In fact, another study (PDF) found that 11% of mobile users start scrolling within the first four seconds of a page loading.
People do scroll—this isn’t the 90s. And they’ll click on your CTAs below the fold, too. So why does “above the fold” matter so much? Because your content sets the stage. It defines expectations about the content to come and its quality.
Justin Rondeau of DigitalMarketer is also an advocate of employing best practices:
Justin Rondeau, DigitalMarketer
“This might be a bit controversial, but I really wish people, both outside and especially within the CRO and growth discipline, would know or admit that best practices are not as bad as they think or have been taught.
“Sure, you shouldn’t blindly apply best practices and expect to see huge increases in leads, sales, etc. BUT! Falling into ‘you have to try that’ to know something is a time-consuming and dangerous process.”
“Simply put, for most companies, there are a finite number of real experiments they can run each year. If they have to test everything, then they won’t do anything. So there needs to be some sort of standard as a starting point. That starting point is… you guessed it: BEST PRACTICES.”
“Think about it. The term ‘best practice’ is really just a synonym for ‘common practice.’ Something that is common is familiar, and a familiar experience is much easier to navigate than an unfamiliar one.”
“Again, I’m not saying that we should adopt all the best practices in some sort of ‘one size fits all’ approach to marketing. You use the best practices as a starting point, you come up with a baseline, and then you start to customize by employing testing methodologies that are actually meaningful.”
“You’re looking for exceptional results. You want to take your industry’s average conversion rate and double it, triple it, even quadruple it! To do that, you need to at least have a foundation to start from with a familiar and usable structure. From there, you can apply all your fun processes and tricks to find those exceptional results for your business. Best practices aren’t as bad as you think (or have been taught).”
As long as you understand the why behind the best practice and stay aware of how it’s evolving over time, it can be helpful. Especially if you don’t have enough web traffic to test yet and haven’t had a chance to dive into conversion rate research.