In terms of business matters, a website is your nonstop salesman. As it works 24/7, day and night, a website is a significant lead and sales generator. However, a website without a good user experience will only take you nowhere.
User experience (UX) is a term that web designers are familiar with. It’s key to attract and engage visitors and make them keep returning. Many know that developing a website with an excellent user experience is not an easy feat, especially for the non-tech savvy.
Worry not! This article will guide you to improve the user experience on your website. You can make your website perform more wonderfully with a bit of extra effort. You can also find more resources to improve your competencies through our training and certification programs.
Without further delay, below we’ve compiled some ways to improve user experience (UX) on your website. Let’s swoop into the discussion!
1. Add Appealing Visuals
Visual aids are necessary for a website to engage visitors, especially if you over lengthy posts. Consider adding useful micro-interactions on your website to be more attractive and helpful to visitors.
Microinteractions are small visual feedback that will help and assist users when they do certain actions. Some common examples of micro-interactions are loading, downloading, and notification signs.
Other than that, you can add photos, graphs, infographics, or screenshots to your web posts to make them more enjoyable to digest. Providing walls of text to your visitors will be daunting for them to stay and read. Users can add social media feeds like embed Instagram feeds on website to add more authentic visuals. This will increase website dwell time as well.
2. Optimize Load Speed
Coming to a slow website is a frustrating experience. It’s significant to consider load speed as an extra five seconds delay can increase the bounce rate by over 20%. The higher bounce rate signifies that visitors are most likely to leave your website without doing any significant action.
You can use Google’s free platform to reveal your website load speed. You will get some insights and tips on how to improve load speed on any device. Also, always compress your featured images. Heavy-sized images are one of the leading causes of a sluggish website.
3. Have Enough White Space
Enough white space on your web pages is essential. A report reveals that white space around titles and text escalates user attention by 20%. It’s also crucial to provide a good design for users and prevent them from feeling stuffy.
However, finding a perfect balance between white space and other web elements can be tricky. Keep in mind not to leave too much white space on the above part of your website. It can be ineffective as you may eliminate vital information due to too much white space.
4. Track Down Your 404’s
A page error can be a significant annoyance for visitors. It can decrease your credibility as a trustable source of information. In the worst case, visitors can leave your website and find a better-performing website.
You can detect 404s using Google Webmaster. Set it on your website and crawl whether your website has any errors. Fix your page errors immediately, and make a regular schedule to run the check regularly.
Also, design your website to enable users to return to the previous track when they meet a 404 error. At least you have a way to lessen their disappointment.
5. Perk Up Responsive Design
A responsive design can be a leading reason for generating excellent user experience. Make sure clickable buttons proceed immediately, images and content on your blog load quickly, and pop-up navigations appear clearly.
All elements that interact with users must be quick to respond. You can consider employing fluid grid systems and media queries to make your website more responsive and easy to load. Moreover, be sure that your website is mobile-friendly.
6. Add a Clear and Powerful CTA
Call-to-actions are vital parts of every website. The primary CTA you put on the face of your website always depends on your goal. Whether you want to encourage people to read your posts, improve brand awareness, or make them convert as paying buyers.
Make a clear and powerful yet attractive call to action to board visitors. You should include a verb or an action word to evoke users’ actions. The CTA that you use should be action-oriented. You can also add FOMO to encourage stronger.
Some examples of powerful CTA include sign-up now, purchase now, subscribe now, get started, and more. If you want to add FOMO, you can try CTAs like ‘buy now before the deal ends,’ ‘be the first 100 participants to get the deals,’ or more.
7. Get Rid of Unnecessary Elements
Many causes can make your website fail to leave a good impression on users. One of the causes has already been mentioned previously, which is heavy images. As a website owner or digital marketer, you should know what more can cause your site to perform poorly.
Sometimes, free website tools, themes, and extra plugins can be the reasons to slow down your website load. Therefore, carefully identifying what makes your website load heavily is necessary. Below we’ve pinned down some elements that can affect your website negatively.
- Large image sizes
- Large embedded videos
- Too many heavy plugins
- A bad web hosting server
- External scripts
- Uncompressed elements
Consider using online tools to detect heavy elements on your website. You can use Pingdom or Website Grader to see how fast your website performs. You only need to enter your URL and see whether it takes long to load your website.
If your bounce rate is high, then you have a poorly-performing website. Take your time to optimize your website by referring to the above points, whether you compress images, eliminate heavy plugins, or others.
8. Optimize for Mobile Use
In a world where 7.1 billion people use mobile devices, some of them can be your web visitors, prospective buyers, or even returning customers. Therefore, providing an excellent website is vital to engage them.
You can try a few ways to make your website mobile-friendly. You can apply some effort to build a mobile-optimized website. Some are by choosing a mobile-responsive theme and creating plenty of submenus.
Responsive submenus, such as pop-up or drop-down navigations, are some options you can try. They are suitable for mobile version websites as they are space friendly. With great segmentation and navigation, you can improve the user experience of your website.
Takeaway
With millions of websites, it’s not a walk in the park to make yours stand out in the crowd. A website with an excellent user experience can be a great weapon to achieve your business goals. So, checking your website performance becomes a natural need.
The above point should be on your consideration to check and optimize regularly. Improving user experience on your website can result in many benefits, including increasing traffic, generating loyal visitors, boosting sales, and, most importantly, growing your business.
Author
Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video production company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).
Twitter: @breadnbeyond
Email/Gravatar: andre@breadnbeyond.com
LinkedIn: Andre Oentoro