All of us have experience with poor websites. Whether it was that slow loading screen that made you click the X, an irritating design or simply a lack of the information you were looking for. You can likely remember examples of sites that have left you looking for a swift exit without the desire to ever return.
If you think your user experience might be lacking on your website, read on to discover our 10 top tips to have your customers staying longer and leaving happy…
1. Create an Intuitive UX Design
User experience is absolutely crucial in any successful website, and that begins with your design. Your site should allow your users to retrieve the information they wish, see the product they want or get where they need to go in the simplest, most straight-forward way.
Your user shouldn’t have to have any special knowledge or skills to navigate your site or understand how to use it. Hence the user experience (UX) part of the design. A lot of businesses make these mistakes when it comes to their website design but it is so important to keep it simple.
2. Remember to Go Mobile-Friendly
More people than ever before now spend more time trawling the internet on their phones than any other device. If you find yourself with a website designed for PCs and laptops alone, the time has come to switch it up. Many sites are going mobile-first, putting a priority on a website design that is responsive to multiple device types.
3. Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Loading Speed
Slower page loading speeds don’t just impact your SEO and concern Google’s algorithms. They also hugely harm your user experience. An impressive percentage of people will leave a page if it is even 1 second slower than they wish, and once they are gone, they are gone for good.
Your SEO company in Brisbane can help you both to check your page loading speed and also to improve it in many ways including compressing any large image, reducing unnecessary text, and more!
4. Make it Easy to Communicate with You
If you truly want to make your website accessible, having access to you should be a big part of that. This can include automated interfaces that carry out conversations for you. AI-based customer support has shown impressive results in terms of customer satisfaction and user experience in recent months.
5. Include FAQs
While it is important for many users to know you are there to communicate with, having clear FAQs can eliminate the need and give them all the information they need in one place. If you can, answer their most likely and most pressing questions instantly right there on the page. That will encourage users to stay longer and interact more with your site.
6. Consider Who Your Users are
This can really be taken in many ways, all of which are important. You should have a website tailored specifically to your target market, whatever that group may be. Some target markets require certain additions to really give a seamless user experience. Make sure you consider multiple languages, locations and text and audio settings on your site.
Arguably the single most important thing to consider in user experience is how accessible your site is to the people who you wish to use it. There can be no experience if they cannot find you, access you and read or take in the information, so this has to be a priority for any website.
7. Internal Linking
Remember, the easier it is to find what you need, navigate around and use your site, the longer people will stay and the more likely they are to complete any CTAs that you want them to. Internal linking is a fantastic way to make your website more user-friendly while also enticing them to stay right where they are (not to mention improving your SEO).
8. Organise your Menu Structure
A messy or confusing menu is a sure-fire way to annoy customers and send them fleeing to your competition. Instead of misleading or overloaded headings, make sure that you have an intuitive yet clearly labelled menu for your customers to use.
You may wish to be clear by saying more about your products, but logical categories can allow people to still find what they need one step at a time. For instance, you wouldn’t need separate headings for all of your digital marketing services. You could list digital marketing services then have a drop down list broken up into email, social media marketing, SEO and so on.
9. Social Media Integration
Social media is one of the main ways that customers engage today. Having integrated social media on your site will encourage reviews, comments and can help convince the user to commit to buying your product.
Far too many websites are placing links to their social media pages in their footers without properly integrating them into their website design. Social media also offers some of the best visuals for your clients. With billions of users across social media platforms, they shouldn’t be dismissed down to the bottom of your webpage, but rather utilised for the good of the user.
10. Choose your CTAs Carefully
The right call to action, or CTA, will work seamlessly with the rest of your site to encourage the user to take that step without negatively impacting their experience.
The first step is to decide what your main CTA is, whether it is to sign up an email or getting a sale, for example. Then you need to select a style and the right text that is short, to the point, and in keeping with your overall design.
Final thoughts
If you have tried and tested all of these tips correctly, by the time your users get to the CTA, they should be far more likely to take positive action than they were before.
There are plenty more ways that you can focus on making your site accessible to your users depending on their needs and wants. So if you need help your marketing company can assist in setting up a seamless site today.
If you are still unsure about the best ways to create an accessible and seamless user experience, just remember that it is all about the customer. Think about who they are, what they might prefer and how to make their lives better, and you will already be giving them the kind of user experience they deserve.
Also read: Benefits of Hiring A UI/UX Design Agency
