Being an online business owner, the website for your business is your biggest digital asset. It serves as a hub to promote your business and the ultimate point of contact where you eventually sell you try to ”sell’ yourself through the means of your key products and services. The technology these days is changing at a very faster pace and thus it is becoming difficult for the online business owners to match up with the recent dos and don’ts for their websites.
However, I’ll share some simple yet proven ways that can have great significance when it comes to improving the user experience of your website.
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Check Site Loading Speed
The loading speed of your website is one of the key elements when it comes to improving the user experience on your website. Today your visitors are always expecting faster loading pages and are very certain to not wait on your website if has a high loading speed. Thus, in order to retain your visitors and lower the bounce rate for your website, you need to have a faster loading site.
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Have a Responsive and Mobile-Friendly Site
The number of smartphone mobile users has significantly increased over a decade and so. So, to match up with the ever-rising number of mobile users, it becomes quite inevitably important for you to have a mobile-friendly website. People these days are not confined to desktops anymore, thus they can access your website on their disposal using their PDAs like tablets and phones. So, you need to have your website designed that gets loaded on different-sized screens that people today use.
As a website owner, you need to know that Google is now penalizing those websites that are not mobile-friendly. You thrive to see your website ranked higher on the Google SERPs, so you need to make your website responsive as well. As previously discussed the websites that aren’t user-responsive and mobile-friendly, can have a higher degree of bounce rate.
The navigation on your website is defined as the path for guiding your website visitors to the most visited pages and products. The navigation headers need to have a user-friendly language that is easy to understand, especially when you have new visitors coming to your site. Also, make sure that you don’t have too many options as this can damage the experience of your website visitor. Various online studies suggest that the average number of options that you can have on your website should be between 3-7.
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More Use of White Spaces
Online research states that using more white space on your website around the headlines and text can enhance the attention of your website visitor by 200%. This can be supported by the fact that the white spaces are one of the attention-drivers for your visitors rather than getting distracted from the sidebar and other content. A visitor should look to focus on only one thing at a single time instance when he is on a landing page of your website. Having more white space helps the user to focus only on one thing- either going through a piece of content or signing up for your website. This, in return, helps in engaging the visitors on your website with high session times.
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Maintain Consistency
As a website owner, it is important for you that remain consistent so that it helps your visitors to have a better recall of your brand. You can achieve consistency on your website using brand colors, having the same style of writing, using the same font and also endorsing a similar style and design across your website. Inconsistency on your website can often leave visitors puzzled and they’re not sure whether they are on the same website or ‘moved’ to a completely new site.
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Ask Minimal Information
When you’re signing up your users for email lists, make sure that you’re not asking them too many questions. You should try to ask them with the least amount of information. Today, a majority of the websites just prefer to ask email id and name, and this is a perfect way. If you ask for more information, then the probability of visitors filling out your form decreases quite significantly. You need to make sure that you ask only the required information that serves your business purposes well.
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Better Categorization
Most of the time, visitors look for a particular category on a website. Having an easy and well-defined categorization helps the visitors to find the content that they are looking for. Improper or mismatched categorization can leave your visitors annoyed and they look upon other sites. For example, if you have a blog page, then you can simply club your blogs under various categories rather than placing them under a single category tab.
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Attractive Call to Actions (CTAs)
Visitors navigate on your website using certain visual cues bridging the blocks of content. CTAs deploy the use of active worlds and bold buttons that your visitors use for navigating to your site and then accordingly perform the next sequence of steps. When you’re designing CTAs for your website, make sure of the fact that the colors have a great impact on user psychology. Using different hues can have a different set of feelings and results on your web visitors. The color that you use for CTAs can either make or break the effective number of user experience conversions on your site. You should also be careful when it comes to the words being used in your CTA buttons.
Remember, more actionable, emotional and time-bounding your CTAs are, higher you’re going to get conversions with enhanced UX.
Hey Rishabh,
This is a good read. After reading this article I spent days to optimize my blog and improve the faster loading. Since then, my blog gets a few more extra clicks each day. I really don’t know that loading speed is the main reason for that but, I believe that might affects significantly on blog traffic.
So, thank you very much for sharing these tips and linking out to my blog as well.
Thanks a lot!!
When your web pages load faster, your users tend to stay more. This results in high session durations & low page bounce rates.