Having a website has become an absolute necessity for business success. With a website, businesses have the opportunity of connecting with their customers and expand their reach globally.Helpful Tips to Boost Your Website’s UX. It is important to ensure website visitors have a good experience to encourage conversion on the website. User experience takes into account how visitors interact with the website- how they ‘feel’ while interacting on the website. When visitors associate positive feelings with the website, they are forming a positive mental image of the brand. Conversion and engagement are important concepts, and user experience is a key factor in determining them.

Helpful Tips to Boost Your Website
Helpful Tips to Boost Your Website

User experience seems to be driving everything these days, from online interaction to everyday relationships. When a person has a bad experience with another, it is very likely that they will avoid each other; this is what businesses want to avoid. More than anything, they need to get website visitors coming back as a result of the wonderful experience they get. Most websites try to project a positive user experience, but not all get it right. Helpful Tips to Boost Your Website’s UX. Do you want to increase conversions? Improve engagement or simply want more traffic? These tips will show you how to get the best out of your website through boosting the quality of UX.

 

  1. Navigation

There is nothing more frustrating to website visitors like poor or complicated navigation. Visitors want to feel in control, they want to easily be able to move from one page to another without hassle. When the navigation is anything less than smooth, frustration sets in. Websites with a large pool of content like blogs should provide a menu and a search button to enable visitors easily find what they need.  It takes an experienced website designer or Website Development Company to provide easy and simple navigation on a website.  Fixing the issue of navigation will go a very long distance in improving user experience. When people do not leave from navigation frustration, there is the possibility that they will perform a certain task on your website- That is conversion!

  1. Website Speed

Page loading time can make or break a website. There is something about slow loading pages that puts people off. According to statistics, over 80% of website visitors abandon a page that takes as long as 2 seconds to load.  When they leave for faster websites (some of which belong to your competitors), there is a lower possibility of them returning to your website again. It is important to test the load speed of your pages across platforms and screen sizes to ensure every visitor gets the ultimate experience.  To check the speed of your website, Google provides a free tool here. Take note that large image and video sizes on the website can increase the loading time of a web page. Ensure the images on your website are not slowing things down but increasing engagement and driving conversions.

  1. Do Not Use Excessive Ads

Ads are great for websites because they provide an additional source of revenue to the business but what if they are a nuisance to your visitors? Some websites really take things overboard with ads; they make sure there is no white space on the website for the eyes of the visitor to breath. Excessive ads interfere with the site layout and navigation; they create the feeling that the page has no direction- Even the call to action button gets lost in the ‘noise’ from the ads. To improve user experience, necessary to keep ads to a minimal. Create room on the web page; do not be afraid to use the white space.

  1. Feedback

This tip is often omitted, but based on its importance; it should be at the top. Feedback points out the hole(s) in the entire system.  When there is an issue with speed, with navigation, engagement and so on- it is through feedback that website owners easily discover this. When visitors provide feedback about their experiences on the website, it serves as data for improvement. Before you provide room for feedback from visitors get ready to deal with whatever may arise- some issues may not be visible from the point of view of the service providers. But it may be very glaring to the user. Feedback can be positive – when most of the feedback are positive, it is a clear indication that the user experience is favorable. When most of the feedback is negative, it means the UX is poor and calls for improvement.

Note: If the provided feedbacks are publicly visible, some visitors may use the provided information as part of what they need to make a decision. Take for example two competing businesses, the website with the positive ratings get more trust from visitors than one with negative ratings.

  1. Response Time

Websites like ecommerce can have visitors who feel the need to interact with the business in order to get sufficient information for decision making. They make enquiries, ask questions, and negotiate deals. When these are sent out, it is important that the response time is as short as possible. When visitors do not get the response on time, they simply leave. Some ways of reducing response are using chat bots or chat assistants to help provide quick and useful response to enquiries. When the issue cannot be solved by the chat bots, a human representative should be on the standby to provide assistance.  It is important to treat the visitors with respect in order to encourage a long business relationship. Ensure you provide all available channels of communication and contact information on the website, this give people the access to reach with their enquiries. Include social media channels and pages and encourage your visitors to subscribe across channels in order to get timely access to information like offers, deals and promotions.

  1. Have A Clear Call to Action

Call to action gives a web page a sense of purpose. A call to action button carries the task visitors are encouraged to perform while on the webpage. This may be to click a link, make a purchase, fill a form, subscribe, like et cetera. Call to action buttons should be bold, clear and very visible to the visitor. When visitors are left to search and discover this button, they may easily be distracted by something on the page. For conversion to happen, a visitor must answer to a call to action. To make the experience better, call to action buttons should be bold and very clear.

  1. Responsive Design

Responsiveness has become an absolute necessity today. This is so popular in the design industry it has become a Web Development Company slogan. Responsive design ensures great user experience across all devices and screen sizes (most especially mobile). Make your website accessible by any device from anywhere.  With responsive design, the layout and content of the website adjusts to fit the screen size of the user, ensuring everyone gets the same experience irrespective of their screen sizes.  Websites that are not responsive use components that a display well on desktop or laptop but does not seem to display properly on mobile. Statistics show that over 50% of searches on Google are done on mobile; this means about half of your website visitors may not enjoy browsing on your website if it is not responsive.

  1. Fix Broken Links

Links are provided on websites to carry out a task; they may point to a page within or outside of the website. When visitors click on links they expect to be taken to the desired destination, if it fails to take them there the link is said to be broken. Broken links are like dead ends, they leave website visitors feeling like they are facing a wall. Most times visitors would rather leave the websites with broken links and go to other available options. Check regularly for broken links and fix them to promote better user experience.

  1. Security

When visitors understand that your website is secure, they can easily feel more comfortable on.  Security is vital for websites to secure the data of users. Ecommerce and other websites that carry out online payments need to secure data from unauthorized access. To ensure better user experience, take measures to secure the website from hacks and other cyber-attacks. Secure websites are generally more enjoyable and trusted.  Trusted websites are more likely to give good user experience and increase conversion rates.

  1. Optimize Content

It was observed that images and videos increase engagement.  A plain page full of text content would get less engagement compared to a similar page with an image added to it.  When using images there are two important rules; first, ensure the image is related to the content and ensure it is high resolution.  Videos follow the same rules although care should be taken not to use very large file sizes that may increase page loading time.  Content optimization will improve user experience through providing high quality and relevant content- exactly what the visitor might be looking for.