Inbound Marketing Blog | Clariant Creative Agency

3 Ways to Increase Website Conversions on a Tight Budget

Written by Beth Carter | Jan 13, '26


If you’re like most marketing leaders my team and I work with, you know your website could be performing better — but the idea of a full redesign feels overwhelming. Website redesigns are expensive, can take months, and probably require more internal bandwidth than you have.

And worst of all? They don’t always guarantee better results.

Fortunately, you don’t need a full website redesign to increase website conversions. In many cases, targeted, strategic updates to specific pages can deliver meaningful improvements in performance — without blowing up your budget or your timeline.

What You’ll Learn in This Post

In this post, I’m sharing three real website optimization examples that show how to:

  • Increase website conversions without a full redesign.
  • Improve website speed and performance with targeted page updates.
  • Optimize TOFU, BOFU, and full-funnel pages on a limited budget.
  • Prioritize website optimization strategies based on effort vs. impact.

And to help illustrate what's possible at different levels of investment, I’ve ordered these mini-case studies from simpler, lower-effort updates to more complex, higher-impact improvements.


The Label Printers: Update the Blog Listing Page to Improve Speed, UX, and SEO

Project Details:

Impact level: Low effort, high leverage
Funnel focus: Top of funnel (TOFU)
Primary goal: Improve website performance and content discoverability

Client website: https://thelabelprinters.com/

The Problem:

The Label Printers publishes a lot of high-quality educational content. Their blog is a critical top-of-funnel asset that supports SEO, thought leadership, and early-stage buyer education.

But their blog listing page was working against them.

The original page:

  • Loaded slowly, especially on mobile.
  • Displayed a large number of posts at once.
  • Offered limited filtering or scanning support.
  • Created unnecessary performance drag that hurt UX and SEO.

Even though the content itself was strong, the experience of accessing that content wasn’t.

When your blog listing page is slow or overwhelming, visitors don’t explore — they bounce. That undermines your ability to increase website conversions later in the funnel.

The Solution:

Instead of redesigning the entire blog or replatforming anything, we focused on a very contained optimization project.

Key changes we made included:

  • Reduced the number of posts displayed per page.
  • Shifted to a cleaner card-based layout.
  • Introduced clearer topic filtering and navigation.
  • Improved image handling to reduce load time.

This was not a visual overhaul. It was a performance- and UX-driven change designed to help users find relevant content faster — and to help search engines crawl the site more efficiently.

Click on the image to view larger.

The Results:

The impact on website speed was dramatic:

  • Mobile PageSpeed score: increased from 8 → 57
  • Desktop PageSpeed score: increased from 53 → 93

Improving website speed is important for SEO because:

  • Page speed is a ranking factor.
  • Faster pages and better US reduce bounce rates and increase time on site, both of which are also ranking factors.
  • Content is now more likely to be consumed and shared.

This is a great example of how improving website performance at the TOFU level supports long-term conversion goals without touching a single product or sales page.

Why This Matters for Conversion Growth:

You can’t increase website conversions if people never make it past the first click.

Optimizing TOFU pages like blog listings:

  • Improves SEO visibility.
  • Expands the number of engaged visitors entering your funnel.
  • Builds trust earlier in the buyer journey.

Small optimizations projects like this may not be glamorous – but even foundational improvements drive meaningful impacts.

ClearSale: Optimize the Contact Us Page to Drive Conversions and Revenue

Project Details:

Impact level: Moderate effort, direct business impact
Funnel focus: Bottom of funnel (BOFU)
Primary goal: Increase website conversions from high-intent visitors

Client website: https://www.clear.sale/

The Problem:

ClearSale’s primary Contact Us page is one of the most important pages on their website. It’s where high-intent prospects raise their hand to talk to sales. But despite its importance, the page was severely underperforming:

  • Very low traffic.
  • Zero form submissions in early 2025.
  • A form that felt intimidating and transactional.
  • No clear explanation for visitors of what to expect after form submission.
  • Messaging that didn’t align with buyer expectations at this stage.

In other words, the page existed — but it wasn’t doing its job.

The Strategy:

As part of a broader website improvement initiative, we prioritized this single, high-impact page and treated it as a standalone website conversion optimization project.

Key changes we made included:

  • Rewrote the headline to clearly state the value of taking the next step.
  • Clarified what the user should expect after submitting the form.
  • Improved visual hierarchy so the form was easier to engage with.
  • Introduced trust elements and social proof.
  • Aligned CTA language with buyer intent (less “submit,” more “get”).

Click on the image to view larger.

As mentioned, this was just the first phase of a larger website roadmap — but even on its own, we were thrilled this project created meaningful movement.

The Results:

Within two months of launching the new page layout, performance data dramatically improved:

  • Page views increased 138%.
  • Form submissions increased 242%.
  • Revenue influenced by the page increased 173%.

This is what it looks like when BOFU optimization strategies are aligned with sales reality.

Why This Matters for Conversion Growth:

If you want to increase website conversions, BOFU pages are where clarity pays off fastest.

Bottom-of-funnel pages like Contact Us and Schedule a Demo pages typically have the highest conversion leverage, making them ideal targets for budget-friendly optimization. Small improvements at the bottom of the funnel can:

  • Reduce sales friction.
  • Increase lead quality.
  • Improve sales team confidence in inbound leads.
  • Deliver measurable ROI quickly.

This kind of optimization is powerful when budgets are tight and teams are under pressure to deliver results fast.


Catapult Employers Association: Overhaul the Homepage to Improve Clarity Across the Entire Funnel

Project Details:

Impact level: Higher complexity, broader impact
Funnel focus: TOFU → MOFU → BOFU
Primary goal: Improve clarity, messaging alignment, and conversion readiness

Client website: https://letscatapult.org/ 

The Challenge:

Catapult’s homepage had grown cluttered and confusing over time. Visitors struggled to understand:

  • Who Catapult worked with.
  • What problems they solved.
  • How their services fit together.
  • What the next step should be to get started.

The homepage tried to do too much — and as a result, it didn’t do enough of anything well.

We realized this wasn’t just a design issue; it was a messaging and positioning problem that affected every stage of their funnel.

The Approach:

Rather than launching a full redesign (which their thinly stretched in-house team didn’t have the bandwidth for), we focused on a tightly defined homepage overhaul, specifically intended to deliver quick wins:

  • Establish a clear messaging hierarchy based on audience pain points.
  • Help visitors immediately connect their problems to Catapult solutions.
  • Simplify the layout to guide users through a logical story.
  • Improve calls to action (CTAs) to better align with multiple buyer intents.
  • Remove low-value or distracting elements that distracted visitors and diluted focus.

Click on the image to view larger.

 

Importantly, this wasn’t about making the homepage “prettier.” It was about helping the home page do its job more effectively.

The Results:

Homepage optimization projects like this are some of our favorite projects to work on, because the results can span the client’s entire organization:

  • Reduce confusion and friction for inbound leads.
  • Improve sales conversations by aligning buyer expectations.
  • Help downstream pages perform better.
  • Create internal clarity for marketing and sales teams.

In many organizations, this kind of work is a prerequisite for later conversion gains elsewhere on the site.

Why This Matters for Conversion Growth:

When your homepage lacks clarity, every other optimization effort has a ceiling.

A clear, well-structured homepage improves conversion performance across the entire funnel by aligning visitor expectations right from the first interaction. These improvements can:

  • Increase confidence across the buyer journey
  • Support TOFU acquisition and BOFU conversion
  • Make future optimization efforts more effective

This is a bigger lift — but it pays dividends over time.

The Takeaway: You Don’t Need a Redesign to Increase Website Conversions

If there’s one thing these examples demonstrate, it’s this:

Smart website optimization strategies outperform big redesigns when time, budget, and bandwidth are limited.

Whether you’re trying to increase website speed, improve website performance, or increase website conversions, the most effective path forward is often:

  1. Identify your highest-impact pages.
  2. Match the optimization effort to the funnel stage.
  3. Fix clarity and friction before aesthetics.

If you’re not sure where to start, look at these usual suspects:

  • Your blog and resource pages (TOFU)
  • Your contact and demo pages (BOFU)
  • Your homepage’s ability to clearly guide visitors to your desired next steps