Irrespective of your goals, the major focus of every website is the visitor. If you’re looking to maximize the potential of your site, User Experience (UX) is a topic you cannot afford to brush over.
There are several ways your site’s UX can impact the profitability of your business. Due to changing trends and technologies, you may want to consider a redesign to ensure that your site doesn’t appear old and outdated. As such, by paying attention to your UX, you’re directly investing in your business.
In this article, we’ll show you how your site’s UX can be the fulcrum of your business’s success and share some tips for improving websites drastically. Let’s get to it!
How Your Site’s User Experience (UX) Can Impact Your Business
UX is a very important factor every website owner should dedicate time and resources to. It primarily impacts how your users feel about your site and your brand. Many people like to use the terms ‘User Experience’ and ‘User Interface’ (UI) interchangeably, but they are fundamentally different.
Though closely related, your site’s UI design is a subset of its UX site design. In very simple terms, UI refers to how your site looks while UX is more about how it works and feels. There are quite a number of technical factors that influence your site’s UX, such as content development, user persona development, and site architecture.
These design elements come together to decide whether or not a site’s user experience can be described as good or bad. Here are some of the ways good UX can impact your business:
-
It drives traffic and conversions. With good design practices, you can easily lead more people to your website and keep them there. For example, AmeriFirst removed navigational links from all their landing pages as they felt they constituted unnecessary clutter. The result was a 10% conversion rate increase.
-
It could boost your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Standards keep increasing every year with regard to SEO. However, your page speed will always be an important ranking factor, as are many others depending on UX design.
-
Your customers will always be satisfied. A recent study revealed that an astonishing 86% of users deleted or uninstalled an app due to a poor UX. If you can get your site’s functionality and form right, you can easily retain more of your prospective customers.
Establishing the importance of good UX isn’t the end of the story. Taking the steps to improve it is obviously just as vital, as we’ll discuss next.
5 Tips for Improving Your Website’s User Experience (UX)
There are quite a lot of ways you can improve your site’s UX. However, the five following strategies could be the most effective for you.
1. Optimize Your Page Load Times
Your page load times and UX are linked. No matter how great your pitch and design may be, if you can’t display them quickly enough, you’re almost sure to lose them. An extra five seconds added to your average page load time can shoot your bounce rate up by as much as 20%.
As such, you’ll want to monitor your page load times with tools such as GTmetrix and Google’s PageSpeed tools.
These can help you assess your site’s performance and identify major areas of concern. GTMetrix in particular offers specific recommendations on how to improve your site’s performance scores. In general, when it comes to UX improvement, you should always start by keeping your site as fast as possible, and work from there.
2. Create a Call To Action (CTA) That Stands Out
A CTA is a powerful tool you can use to leverage user behaviors. An average site visitor relies extensively on visual cues when navigating websites. CTAs that contain action words and are strategically placed are effective in motivating the user to take a desired action.
Similarly, you should always experiment with color when designing a CTA. Many brands and marketers have observed varying results when it comes to different colors and shapes used in their designs.
3. Opt for a Mobile-Friendly Design
World wide web traffic is now generated mostly from mobile devices. In the first quarter of 2020, 51.92% of all online activities were carried out on mobile (excluding tablets). Therefore, it is imperative to implement a responsive mobile-friendly design across your website.
A responsive site will be able to scale up or down to suit any screen size. There’s really no magic formula for creating a responsive website in a jiffy. However, incorporating best practices such as making use of optimized fonts, including a mobile menu, and reducing form sizes will guarantee your mobile users a great experience.
4. Fix Your Broken Links
Broken links are a major pain you won’t want to put your site visitors through. While Google doesn't punish site owners for having a few broken links, the majority of users will.
A site visitor may not pay much attention to the first broken link they find on your website. However, with more lurking under the hood, your site will quickly begin to look less authoritative.
Google Analytics is a powerful free tool you can use to get rid of broken links. It helps you to find broken links by generating a custom report, which then gives you the opportunity to do further work to clean things up.
5. Make Use of a Defined Heading Hierarchy
Finally, you must also pay attention to your website’s headings. They need to be very specific and targeted towards answering major questions potential customers ask. In other words, your headings should contain strategic keywords that are relevant to your niche, while also being clear and captivating to read.
Here’s a good example from the Tilde website of the type of heading hierarchy you should target:
You’ll notice that the headings are highly specific to the likely keywords targets. Apart from helping to retain the customer’s attention and sales conversion, this page is also well optimized for search engines. Search engines typically prioritize headings site-wide when ranking sites, and a well-defined heading structure will influence your traffic and conversion positively.
UX Site Conclusion
Maintaining good UX throughout your site is a crucial part of digital marketing. Solid UX not only drives traffic but can also help to retain old customers. Likewise, your branding efforts can benefit a lot from this.
In order to improve your website’s user experience, the most important thing to take into consideration is your page speed. After improving your page load times, you should also incorporate UX best practices like implementing unique CTAs, fixing broken links, and using mobile-friendly designs.
Image credits: kreatikar.
