One of the keys to effectively running a business is providing customers with a satisfying experience. Because many of your customers will encounter your business online, it’s important that your website provides visitors with a good user experience. The following five tips can help improve your website’s user experience and make your customers’ lives easier, as well as increase your site’s trust factor and authority.
#1 Improve Page Load Time to Reduce Wait Time
First and foremost, website visitors are likely to care more about speed than all the bells and whistles you want to add to your website. Page load speed is very important to a user’s experience. If your website takes time to load, chances are users may leave instantly.
A study done by Google found that as page load time goes from one second to five seconds, the probability of a site visitor bouncing increases 90%. Therefore, it’s important to check your page speed. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to get a breakdown of what needs attention. To improve the speed, you will need to check the factors like how bulky the page is, embedded media on the website, and use a cache.
When it comes to user experience, getting your load times where you want them will have a positive impact on your overall site performance. Slow load speeds may result in a page freezing or crashing. Such critical errors can cause unfavorable effects on the user experience and customer satisfaction of your site. Faster load times can allow visitors to engage more with a page when they can move freely and focus on the content instead of on their wait time, delivering a better user experience.
#2 Use Icons to Compact Screen Real Estate
Icons or symbols are very useful when creating a better user experience. They simplify objects, ideas, and commands into graphic symbols that may be quickly identified by the human eye. Some examples to consider are icons for home, printing, or search.
If your mobile site has long paragraphs of text, then chances are rare that visitors will read it. Icons can be a great way to bring essential content to the point. They are a great attention grabber and they help your website visitors to find and scan content.
When using icons, make sure you base them on metaphors that people understand, or introduce them together with more descriptive text. When you place icons on your site, keep the proximity principle in mind and group them with content they relate to.
#3 Provide a Responsive Website to Ensure Consistency
Building a website is not enough if it’s not mobile-friendly. As a business, it is important to meet consumers where they are, and increasing number of users are regularly accessing the internet on a wide range of mobile devices. So it’s critical to make sure you have a responsive website to ensure your content will display correctly for all users.
It’s important to constantly ask, “How will consumers be interacting with my site?” Whether a user wants to buy your product on their smartwatch or sign up to your newsletter on their mobile device, your goal is to make the process as easy and fast as possible. Responsive web design aims to create a great user experience for all users, no matter the device they are using.
#4 Integrate Social Media to Develop Deeper Relationships
In 2020, an estimated 3.6 billion people are using social media worldwide. Social media is an excellent tool for connecting with new audiences and building deeper relationships with your current customers. Your website should be the hub of social interaction, not sitting on the sidelines. It has the potential to draw together conversation across multiple networks.
From homepage social feeds and displaying social buttons to utilizing hashtags and social logins, there are multiple ways you can integrate social media with your website. It’s important to figure out which channels are suitable for your brand and where your site may currently be lacking (whether it’s social video or sharing event news, for example) and start there. Not only does social media integration help increase awareness of your company, but when you provide your visitors the opportunity to share your content easily, you’re also improving user experience.
#5 Make Company Information Easily Accessible for Users to Get in Contact
44% of users answered in a survey that they would leave a company’s website if there is no contact information or phone number. It’s important to make sure your visitors don’t have to waste time searching for your contact information. Refrain from hiding your Contact Us page behind your About Us label in the navigation; instead prominently feature a Contact Us link and information in the header and even the footer of your website.
You should also never replace contact information in favor of automated methods such as online chat or contact forms. Be sure to include the company’s addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses on your Contact Us page, as users still expect to find traditional methods of getting in contact. By giving users quick and easy ways to directly reach your organization, you appear reliable, build trust, and provide a good user experience.
In conclusion, a good user experience boils down to leading your site visitors to the information they need, while trimming away anything that might disrupt their journey. The five techniques we reviewed above can help make interactions with your website more beneficial to its users and improve your site’s user experience. For more insights and strategies for creating an optimal website user experience, contact MoreVisibility today.