There are numerous aspects to consider when building a website for your online business. You probably already know about the importance of SEO-optimized content, backlinks, the use of social media, and other methods to gain more site visitors and potential customers. However, another aspect of building a successful online business that often gets overlooked is to improve user experience on your website.
Many business owners focus so heavily on attracting more traffic that they forget about retaining it. And that is a big mistake you shouldn’t make if you want your business to grow. If you want more of your visitors to become your customers, then you must definitely improve user experience. To get you started, we’ll tell you about 4 of the best ways to improve user experience on your website.
1. Improve user experience with loading times
Most of us lead busy and hectic lifestyles, always looking at our clocks and being in a constant hurry. Therefore, most people don’t have the patience to sit through loading screens that last for more than a couple of seconds. If your website’s loading times are over 3 – 4 seconds, then you are probably losing around a third of your traffic.
Yes, a ton of users would click away from a page if it hasn’t been loaded by the count of three. For this reason, it’s important to monitor your site’s speed and do what you can to improve it. This is hands down one of the best things you can do to improve user experience on your website.
There are many tools, both free and paid, to help you with this. Google even has a free speedtest service that lets you measure a page’s speed and gives you detailed and useful data. As for how to improve the site’s speed, there are many different things you can do. Moving to a better host, using the correct size and image format, using fewer plugins (for WordPress), you name it.
2. Website structure
Something equally annoying to a slow-loading site is a site with a bad structure and navigation. The website of a successful business should have all its important resources and pages no further than two clicks away.
Its navigation menus should be intuitive and logically structured, so that it’s as easy as possible for a person to find the information they are looking for. Unfortunately, this is yet another greatly overlooked aspect, as many sites’ navigation feel like a confusing maze with no prize at the end.
3. Improve user experience with proper use of white space
This might sound like a weird way to improve user experience on a site, but it’s a surprisingly important one. What we are referring to is how the different blocks of content on a page are separated by empty space.
Have you ever been to a site that feels unpleasant simply because its pages are cluttered with content? That is what poor user experience looks like and, in this case, the reason is poor page design.
The good news is that you don’t need to be an expert to make your pages look tidy and inviting. Just make sure to leave enough empty space between and around your blocks of content. Doing so helps in two very important ways.
First, it doesn’t overwhelm the user with visual noise and lets them focus on each block without getting distracted. Secondly, it helps the individual blocks to stand out more and attract attention, rather than get lost among other content.
4. Make essential information stand out
To improve user experience on your site, you must also ensure that users are able to easily identify what’s important. By this, we mean that you must use visual queues to highlight the essential information on your pages.
For instance, if you want to give an informative, yet brief description of a product, a good way to do that is to use bullet points and bolded text. Framing essential text and giving it a different color is another useful method of helping it stand out.
However, you must also be careful when choosing which bits of information are worth highlighting in this way. Remember that the goal is to convey important information to the user.
Doing so will help them quickly and easily decide whether a given product or service is what they need. In turn, this will almost certainly improve your conversion rates, because more people will actually get familiarized with what you have to offer, rather than click away from your site.
Final notes
Site owners are often so focused on satisfying the search engines that they forget for whom their sites are made. However, attracting traffic by ranking well in Google and Bing is only the first step. Once you start getting the views, you must then make them count through improving user experience.
As you can see, there are a ton of ways to do that. There will always be images to optimize, dead links to remove, and page design changes to be made. But if you do put in the work, we promise you that you’ll soon start seeing positive changes in your site’s popularity and your business’ growth.
In the meantime, if you are looking to improve user experience on your website, we can help! Feel free to contact us and learn more about our digital marketing services. You can find more info at Sylably.com or on our official Facebook page.
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