5 Tricks to Improve Your Website's User Experience

A well designed website is vital to the success of any business these days. It’s one of the best ways to generate leads and for most customers, their first impression of your business comes from the website. If it is modern and sleek, and it works well, they will have a positive impression of your business. But if it is poorly designed and outdated, their opinion of you will quickly change and you can lose a lot of business. 

The design of your website is important and you need to consider what your target audience is and what kind of design they will respond to. You also need to ensure that all of the content on the site is good. But the most important thing, and the thing that businesses often neglect is the user experience. The user experience refers to the quality of interaction that customers have with your website. A website that offers good user experience will be simple to navigate and won’t leave consumers feeling frustrated when trying to find certain pieces of information on your site. User experience is often an afterthought and businesses put more effort into the design and functionality of the site. But it doesn’t matter how many great features you have on the website if it is not easy to use those features. If the user experience is not good, people are likely to leave the site a lot quicker and you’ll end up with a high bounce rate. 

If you think that you might have an issue with poor user experience on your website, here are a few simple changes that you can make to improve it. 

Invest In Website Testing 

The easiest way to know whether your website offers a good user experience or not is to invest in website testing. If you set out a series of tasks and ask users to complete them, you will be able to identify areas where people are having difficulty. This will give you a sense of how your website is performing and which parts need work. Rushing your site out without testing it thoroughly is always a mistake and it’s likely that you will have big issues with user experience if you do. 

Keep On Top Of Maintenance 

Lack of maintenance is another simple mistake that businesses make. Even if your website is well designed, the user experience is not going to be positive if parts of the website are broken. Menus that don’t work, links that go to dead pages, or a search function that doesn’t work properly are all common issues that you might experience with your website and they make it difficult for people to navigate the site easily. You can get around that easily if you make sure to keep on top of website maintenance and check the site regularly so you know if there are any issues that need to be resolved. 

Optimize For Mobile Devices 

Over 50 percent of web traffic comes from mobile devices rather than laptops and desktop computers. That means that a website that doesn’t work properly on a mobile device is offering a poor user experience to over half of the people that access the site, if not more. This happens because businesses don’t want to spend time and money optimizing their site for mobile devices as well. But if you are going to ensure that you see a good return on investment from your website, you need to invest in web development services that can optimize the site for mobile devices and ensure that it runs smoothly on any device that your customers might be using. It will cost more to develop the site for all devices, but it will massively improve the user experience on your website, and that will help to drive sales and increase revenue. Finding ways to save money in your business is important, but your website isn’t the place to make those savings. 

Use White Space 

Trying to pack too much information into one page is a common mistake that people make when designing a website, and it really ruins the user experience. When you are bombarded with too much information, it is difficult to scan the page and find what it is that you’re looking for. It also makes the site look very messy, so you should strip it back a bit. A lot of people are afraid to use white space because they worry that it makes the site look too empty, but that’s not the case. White space is something that you should try to take advantage of because it helps to make the site a lot clearer so important information isn’t getting lost in the noise. When designing a page, you need to decide which information is essential and get rid of everything else. If information is not completely necessary, it can go on a different page or be dropped from the site entirely. 

Improve Loading Times 

Technology is supposed to make things quick and efficient, but if your website loads very slowly, it has the opposite effect. People are not willing to wait forever and if a page takes more than 5 seconds to load, a lot of people will just give up on the website altogether, so slow loading times are a big problem for you. There are a lot of different reasons for slow load times, but some are more common than others. An overcrowded site that has too many pictures or animations on it may have issues with loading. It could be a problem with your hosting services as well, and that’s a common problem for businesses that are growing. While your hosting may have been fine to start with when you didn’t have that much traffic, it may start to struggle as traffic increases. As your business grows, you need to update your hosting services to accommodate the increased traffic on your site, otherwise, it will not run smoothly. 

If you can make these simple changes to your site, you will be able to improve the user experience and hopefully, see a better return on the money that you are investing on your website.