How to drastically improve your website’s User Experience?
As an online business owner, your website is your most valuable business asset. Your website is the keystone of your digital marketing efforts. Website is the ever-functioning marketing tool, that you can use to sell and promote your services online and get people to take specific actions.
It is also the most important tool in converting web traffic into viable leads. Depending on how the user feels when he comes to your website, it determines whether he or she will return to the website or not?
If users found it hard to find things and have trouble navigating and understanding what your website is about, then forget conversions, but users will not even like to return to your website.
Hence, you must pay attention to the user experience (UX) on your website and try to improve it. You will quickly find that focusing on your website’s user experience is a highly effective way to make customers happy, increase revenue, and build a strong customer base.
What is User Experience?
User Experience (UX) Design is the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and efficiency of user interaction with the website or apps. The point is that UX Design helps in making a website that you develop easy to navigate, and convenient for users. When you improve user experience, you make it more appealing for consumers to engage with your brand.
However, as said by web design Jacksonville, digital trends that are rapidly changing can make your website feel outdated. While a redesign may be attractive sometimes, but you may not have the time or resources to invest in such a big project.
To help you overcome this challenge, we have come up with a list of 5 simple ways to enhance your user experience.
Ways to Improve your website’s User Experience
1. Allow White Space
Most website visitors will spend less than 15 seconds on your website, but that number increases by 20% when whitespace is used effectively in the design. This is one of the quickest and easiest ways to improve your design. Even subtle amounts of whitespace will make your designs look more polished.
Spacing is what makes your website feel accessible and user-friendly. This “breathing space” improves the appeal and readability of your content. White space is an essential aspect of good website design.
The design background color does not have to be white all the time. It only needs to be the space between website elements. White space also adds elegance to your web pages.
Many times, I have heard clients complain that there was too much white space on their website and that this unused space should be used for advertising more of their services. But white space is important to improve the legibility of your content while also allowing the user to focus on the elements around the text.
This space around text and titles also increases user attention. White space can also make your website feel free and modern and if your branding is compatible with these then it will help you communicate with the user.
However, one disadvantage of white space to consider, is that it does indeed take up space. Following are some ways you might use white space to boost the UX of your website:
· Increase the line space for your text
· Increase white space on the left and right margins in long text blocks
· Instead of placing images in line with the text, place them on top or under text blocks.
2. Make use of easy to read colors and fonts
When planning out a client website, this is something that we designers spend a lot of time thinking about. Of course, we want the layout to look appealing, but we also strive to make life as easy as possible for users through typography, layout, and color choices.
In fact, we often see a connection between these elements and bounce rates, the harder it is for your users to understand what your page says, the more likely they are to leave.
For colors, you have to always aim for a good contrast. There is a reason that most websites have a white background with black text because it’s simple, clean, and easy to read. But most websites aren’t just black and white, so we need to look carefully at the colors you are using and ensure that there is a good contrast between font, colors, and backgrounds.
Next, you have to choose a highly readable font. Keep in mind that, what you find easy to read may be difficult for others. That’s why a web design company uses their years of experience to work and help you choose the right colors and fonts to clearly express your brand, while also giving the best possible experience to your website visitors.
3. Optimize your page speed
Your page load times and user experience are linked with each other. No matter how good your pitch and design are if you can’t load your page quickly enough, you are almost sure to lose customers.
An extra five seconds added to your page load time can increase your website’s bounce rate up by more than 20%.
Users are very impatient and they don’t like to wait for your web pages to load. How fast these users can access your web pages is a good indicator of how likely you are to maintain the audience. Website visitors decide in a few seconds whether to stay on your website or leave. And if you want them to keep coming back, you must make an active effort to optimize your website for speed by reducing the load-time of a website.
So, to speed up your website, start by compressing all your images before uploading them onto your website. The size of the image file is one of the most common causes of a slow page speed.
As such, to monitor your page load times you can use tools like GTmetrix and Google’s Page Speed tools. These can assist you to evaluate your website’s performance and identify major areas of concern. GTmetrix also provides specific recommendations on how to improve your website’s performance scores. In general, when it comes to UX improvement, you should always start by making your website as fast as possible, and work from there.
4. Make your Call to Actions visible and apparent
When you are focusing on big-picture elements like the website’s look and page layout, you may forget about the call to action. However, calls to action (CTA) are such an important element of your website design that they deserve their special attention.
Customers expect your website to have links, buttons, and CTAs that can help them navigate quickly. That’s why every single page on your website should include at least one clear and compelling call to action button that helps users take the next step.
The most common goal for businesses is to send users to their contact page. If this describes you, you should have a call to action that leads to your contact page from every page on your website. This is an important aspect of the design process to consider, as some pages are more suited to certain calls to action.
You should also create brief CTAs capable of attracting visitors, and place them in strategic areas on the website where users are sure to notice and react to them.
Here are some ideas for calls to action that you can use on your website
· An option to subscribe to your newsletter or blog
· A link to your contact page
· Links to other pages on your website
· Downloadable PDFs, like spec sheets, product catalogs, and helpful guides
· An online scheduling tool that helps the user to make an appointment
· A link to related blog posts throughout a blog
5. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly and Responsive
A number of websites on the Internet aren’t designed to be easily accessed by mobile users. This can affect the user experience and drive the customers away to the competitor’s website.
Today, the largest percentage of internet users are mobile users, and this trend is expected to grow. So, your website must be mobile-friendly and easy to navigate no matter what type of device you use to access it. If you are not optimizing your website for the best mobile experience, users are more likely to leave it, and you are basically missing out on a huge number of potential customers.
Recently, Google started penalizing websites that are not mobile-friendly, making the need for responsiveness even more essential. Google crawls both your desktop and mobile websites and indexes your website from them. That means, in terms of SEO, a mobile-friendly website can help you rank higher in search engines.
Conclusion
Our Web Design Jacksonville experts have seen, that maintaining a good user experience throughout your website is an important aspect of digital marketing. A good UX not only drives traffic to your website but can also help to keep old customers. Likewise, your branding efforts can greatly benefit from this. The key to successful UX design is making it work for both your customers and your platform. We hope these tips have given you some ideas on how you can improve your website’s user experience without spending the dollars on a complete redesign
