How to Improve Your Conversion Rate for Free (With Zero Dollars Spent!)

Trying new ways to increase conversions is something every business owner should do at least once a month. Most of us only tackle this issue of conversion only when there is a problem, and a site is not producing the conversion rate that is expected. The problem is, that when we are forced to improve the conversion rate, this is a time when we are usually more frugal regarding spending money, and most conversion related tools and plugin cost a great deal of money, other with a one time payment or more frequently with a monthly fee.

In this article I want to share 3 amazing conversion improvement plugins for WordPress, that are absolutely free and perform just as well as the paid alternatives. These are well supported and well updated plugins, that are offered for free because they make money on premium services. Don’t worry, I’ve made sure the free plan is sufficient enough to truly have a positive effect on conversions. Once you are swimming with the increased revenue, you can consider to go ahead and purchase the pro version.

The plugins I am including are plugins that require no coding skills at all, so you can quickly improve the way you convert your traffic into leads, sales or subscriptions.

1. Creating a highly converting landing page for free: Elementor

The first WordPress plugin, Elementor, is actually a page builder developed by my company, that lets you create any landing page you want. It works just like other landing page builders like Unbounce and Leadpages, only it is completely free. The best thing about our WordPress page builder is that it works the fastest, and allows you to create any kind of landing page quickly and easily.

This plugin lets you build landing pages much faster, and you don’t need to do any coding at all.

Paid alternative: Unbounce, Leadpages

2. Adding pop up forms

Once you have the visitors on your landing page, you need to get them to submit their detail.

I see so many blogs and websites that create really amazing content, posts that I am sure have taken them hours and hours of work, yet their services or products remain obscured.

Some have an aversion to pop ups, but there is no denying that they have a huge positive affect on conversions. WPBeginner states it increased their email subscriptions by a whopping 600%.

Until recently, I thought every WordPress pop up plugin cost money. Until I found Icegram, the free WordPress plugin that lets you create various popup forms.

egegram also lets you do other cool things like create header and footer hello bars, fly-in forms with animations, inline opt-in forms, below content forms and much more.

You can actually test out different popups and check which converts the best.

Paid alternative: Optinmonster

3. Increase conversions & engagement with social media

So now that you’ve built a much more beautiful and professional looking landing page, and you have implemented all the opt-in forms needed, it’s time to get social.

The next step is to increase your visitor engagement by adding social buttons. This way your visitors will be able to share and like the content, and help spread the news about it to other people.

Sumome offers a handy and free WordPress plugin, that among other features includes a floating social menu that is unobtrusive to the actual content. It has over 100K active installs, and is one of the most popular plugins of this category. This plugin also has a fancy lightbox pop up to gather email subscriptions, as well as a welcome mat that appears across the entire screen as a welcoming lead gathering form, before the user even thought of exiting. Its a really advanced plugin with many features, so you can use it for various functions.

Bonus: Other conversion improvement tools

To tell you the truth, implementing 3 new plugin is already hard work, and I don’t want to overwhelm you.

These 3 plugin are the finest plugins I’ve found to help increase conversions on almost any site.

If you want more, there are two other conversion recommendations I have that not every site owner implements:

Invest in choosing the most beautiful images. 

Take a few hours to make a full scan through your various pages and post, and see which images could be added to replaced. There is an abundance of beautiful images that are given away for free under the CC0 license, that can vastly improve how your visitors like your site, and how they are likely to engage and convert.

One amazing site to follow is Unsplash, that has a spectacular wide array of images. Another resource is Gratisography, which includes a bolder and more emotional style of images.

Both resources include images that are unique, and don’t look like stock images, and thus draw the attention of the visitor in a much better way.

Go past Google Analytics, and use Hotjar for free.

Most users settle for Google Analytics, but Hotjar is another service that provides a much more in depth analysis of the site. This is crucial in order to better understand how the visitor engages the content in the site and navigates through the various pages.

Conclusion

If you follow the exact instructions in this article, you can vastly increase your site’s ability to produce valuable leads and conversions. These steps include:

1. Creating a landing page
2. Adding opt in forms
3. Increasing social engagements
4. Improving images
5. Adding advanced analytics

All these five point can be achieved without paying a cent. I do recommend your support the above WordPress plugins and services in other ways: leave a positive review, share with your Facebook friends and credit them appropriately. When the time comes, and your conversions and revenue increase, don’t forget to go back to them and upgrade to their premium service. I do believe that it’s important to show gratitude for a product that helped you grow, even if it is a long time after it had helped.

I hope this short guide sets you in the right direction. If you have any other ways that have helped you increase conversions and engagement, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.