Your website is one of your business’s most powerful tools and one of the most effective, cost-efficient marketing channels you have. When someone visits your website, you have such a short amount of time to grab their attention which is why your site needs to be visually pleasing with a clear message and a simple design that is easy to navigate.
A high volume of customers are likely to abandon brand loyalty with one poor experience and because of this, it’s very important to make sure that your website performs well to avoid this from happening. Having a visually appealing website can represent your business and help ensure that a visitor stays on your site to find what they need. With digital trends always changing, it can be easy for your website to fall behind and become outdated in comparison to your competitor’s site.
Before setting your website live, you should consider undertaking user testing using Indigo design from Infragistics. If your site does not work as it should, you will see an impact on metrics such as site visits and conversion rates. There is also a chance that if it does not function as it should that Google will penalize you and as a result, it will perform poorly in rankings. There is no point having a fancy looking website if it can’t be found. If you are a small or growing business, it is beneficial to have a more basic website, where less can go wrong. Additional features can always be added at a later date and this can also save on costs.
If you are looking to improve your website and enhance your user’s experience, keep reading as we will look at the ways you can go about this.
Keep the design simple and fresh
The first thing potential customers will see when they click on your website is the home page. First impressions count, and your site needs to tell visitors who you are, what your business is, and what they can do on your site. This information should be presented clearly to them as they shouldn’t have to go clicking through different pages or scrolling endlessly trying to find this. You need a clear message or a call to action to encourage them to stay on your site, as the wrong impression can have them clicking exit in seconds.
Use engaging calls to action
Calls to action (CTAs) are important. You have users on your website which means they are already interested so now you need to encourage them to take the next step. Think carefully about the text you include on the CTA, and the button should always start with a verb or an action word, like ‘download’ or ‘go to checkout’. This allows users to navigate through your site easily and find what they are looking for in a location that they expect to find it in.
Another thing you should consider when using CTAs is the use of color. You may be aware of the psychology of color and how different shades have different effects on people. This is something you need to consider and determine what message you are trying to evoke from your users. You may need to play around with the button colors to see which ones work best for your website.
Optimize page speed
People seem to be very impatient these days as they are used to everything happening quickly and one of the most annoying things visitors can experience is a website that takes too long to load. This can be an extremely frustrating experience and can make potential customers bounce. Visitors expect a website to load almost straight away so if your site is taking longer than it should, you could be driving customers away.
One of the main reasons your site may be slow when loading is because of the size of your image files. To prevent this, you should compress all the images before loading them to your site. To improve your desktop and mobile load time you can get your PageSpeed score from Google who also offers suggestions as to how you can make it faster.
White space is important
A good website with great design has plenty of white space. Having white space around images, text, and titles is important because it can increase the user’s focus and attention. It helps make your website design look fresh and modern while making your content more readable. You do need to find the right balance of white space though, as too much of it can end up replacing important information. However, you don’t want to fill the site space with lots of advertising as it can make your site look cluttered.
Use internal linking
You should always try to keep users moving when on your website and the best way to do this is to use internal linking. Make sure links are easily identifiable by making them a different color text to the rest of the content or by underlining the text. This will prompt the user to click through to another page on your site. You don’t want visitors to click on your website and come to a dead-end, you need to always find a way to keep them moving from page to page.
For example, on your home page make sure you have a link to your services page and that it clearly states this in the text. This way, the user will know what to expect when clicking on it. Then on your service page, you can include a CTA with a link to your contact form.
Meet the team pages
If you want people to trust and buy from your business, you have to be able to let them get to know you. This will let the user see the type of people you have working for your company and it’s a good way for you to showcase what your culture is about. Create individual team pages to help you rank better in Google. If you have all your team on one page, this will make it harder for Google to know what to rank that page for.
Make your site mobile friendly
A simple and effective way to improve your site’s usability is by optimizing your site to make it mobile friendly. As mobile devices have advanced, people are accessing websites more frequently from their phones. It’s vital that your webpage is mobile friendly so that the user can navigate through your site with ease. No one wants to pinch and zoom in to read text or to see an image. Plus, if your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you can receive a penalty from Google. Another reason why you should make your site mobile friendly is that Google updated their mobile search rankings algorithm to allow web pages that are mobile-friendly rank higher than pages that are not.
Use bullet points for key information
When you have key information that you want users to be able to find quickly, it’s best to have this in bullet points to allow the user to source the information and to be able to digest it in a simple way. Things like the key features of products or services you provide, how they can benefit the user, or how it can solve their problem, are the type of things users want to be able to come across on your website.
To make key information stand out to the user, you can be as creative as you want. For example, you could use icons that demonstrate the points you are trying to make, like a pot of money if you’re trying to make a point about how to save on spending. These icons also make the point easily identifiable to the user.
Final thought
It’s important to make your website as user-friendly as possible as this can affect how a customer may view your brand. If your website is fresh and modern, it is likely to encourage them to go through with a purchase and to keep coming back to your website going forward. Not only that though, but an optimized, responsive website that is loads quickly, is visually appealing, and engages with its users can also help improve your rankings on search engines.
User experience is not necessarily something that people think about when building and maintaining their website, however, it is a lot more important than it appears. User experience can often be overlooked by businesses for other things such as search engine optimization and the design of the site, but if you don’t have a good user experience then you will find your customers and potential customers will end up clicking off your site to go elsewhere.
We hope that the tips outlined in this blog post have given you some things to consider if you are looking to improve your website’s user experience. Remember that your site is a marketing channel and you should try to keep it updated to help it perform as best as it can.
