Have you put much thought into your website’s user experience yet? If not, you definitely should.
Because of our technology-centered society, your website is one of the most powerful marketing tools your company has. It’s a full-time salesman.
You wouldn’t let a human salesman show up to work looking like a total mess without a shirt, would you? You wouldn’t let him stand around for great lengths of time doing nothing while your customers wait to get served, right?
That’s because the user experience is highly important to user satisfaction and successful marketing. The same is true when it comes to your website.
To achieve a positive user experience, your website needs to function well and easily. It needs to appear sleek and inviting. It needs to serve your customers.
Focusing on user experience when designing and reconfiguring your website is a great way to help draw traffic to your site–and to keep visitors around once they’ve entered. A good user experience means your site is useful and helpful. It builds trust and good relationships with clients.
Here are 7 expert tips on how you can improve your website’s user experience!
1. Make White Space Your Friend
Many people look at a web page with lots of blank space and regard it as a waste of real estate. Shouldn’t all the available areas be used to showcase more content?
Your site is, of course, a platform to post all relevant content–but that doesn’t mean you should shove it all into a single page.
Allowing for blank or “white space” (even if your page background is blue or green!) helps make your site’s layout more user-friendly by making the layout easier and less overwhelming for visitors to process.
White space opens up the flow of your site, allowing it to feel more comfortable and sleek. Plus, a generous amount of white space increases user attention by 20%.
2. Boost Your Page Speed
Remember dial-up Internet? You’d wait and wait at the sound of that screeching dial tone…
The good news is, those days have passed! But if your website’s page speed is lagging, your users may feel as though they’re sucked back into the early-2000’s. A delay of 2 seconds can cause up to 87% of your site’s traffic to take off running for a quicker site.
You can get your page speed score through Google and improve user experience by stepping up your page speed game.
3. Break Things Up With Bullets
Remember what we talked about with white space? How breaking things up and making things easier to process visually can improve your site’s user experience?
The same is true when it comes to bullet points.
If you’re posting a blog on a complex topic, consider breaking some of the complicated parts up with bullet points. This gives visitors the chance to itemize information which breaks down the information in a more-chewable way.
Bullets allow readers to process information more quickly, which allows them to absorb more of your site’s content at once!
4. Write Better Headlines
Choosing the best possible headings for your website’s content can help user experience in a lot of ways.
At a basic level, a good, well-written headline that includes wisely-chosen keywords can be exactly what you need to help your audience find your content in the first place. Search engines put lots of weight on headlines when it comes to which articles are the most highly ranked in their results.
Better headlines can also help you to target your audience’s specific attention, using their interests to draw them to your page. Plus, a well-crafted headline often hints at well-crafted content, which is a total “must” for a good user experience.
5. Craft Better Calls-to-Action
Calls-to-action isn’t only useful in documentaries and public service announcements, you know. They can also serve as an important element of your page and help guide users through different parts of your site.
At the end of each post, it’s important to include a call-to-action to help your visitors decide where to go next. If you’re hoping for a post to direct your users toward signing up for your email chain, consider including a call-to-action that’s crafted on the action- and time-sensitive language, like “Sign up now!”
Firm, enthusiastic action words may be exactly what your site needs to keep your user experience going. Get creative.
6. Use Images Wisely
While the world of stock photos provides a seemingly endless supply of photographs, you can use to build your site around, if you’re hoping for a top-notch user experience, you may want to rethink your use of generic stock photos.
Many users find themselves skeptical of companies that use too many stock photos rather than custom photos that showcase the company’s brand. But using custom images tactfully on your site can improve visitors’ trust in your company, and it can increase the chances they’ll return to your site.
Images are powerful elements when it comes to catching human attention. Make the most of that attention and boost user experience along the way by including brand-specific custom photos!
7. Keep Things Consistent
While spending some good, quality time with your site’s content, users should never question whether or not they’re in the right place. Establishing an aesthetic and tone for your site can prove very important for your brand and your user’s overall experience.
Each page on your site should be consistent with the rest. That means the same general layout, the same color scheme and fonts, the same heading and formatting style, the same writing voice, and so on.
Don’t make your readers question if they’re in the right place. Keep things consistent and intentional throughout all pages of your site’s content.
Want More on Website User Experience?
Your site is never too old, new, or successful to start reconsidering its user experience. As with most things on Earth, user experience and the things that classify it as “good” are always changing; your knowledge on the subject should always be changing and growing, too. For more on website user experience, check out our development page right now!
