5 Steps
The most important thing about any website is the user experience it delivers. Your UX is what is going to make your website memorable and keep your customers coming back and remaining loyal. Your website has to offer a good UX and this can be achieved in many ways, some more technical than others. Ensuring your website is as user friendly as possible, as quick as possible and as well organised as possible will really help impress your potential customers.
User experience can broadly be defined as all aspects of end-user interaction with your company, your services and your products. Something as broad as that can be hard to focus in on but here we’re looking at five ways you can definitely make a different to your UX for the better.
1. Faster Page Loading Time
Around 40% of all visitors to website will abandon them if they take longer than three seconds to load. That doesn’t give you much leeway and highlights how important fast loading time actually is. Three seconds isn’t much time to make a good impression but you need to use every second you can. A professional design can help speed up that page load time but simple tricking include resizing or removing large images that aren’t central to the content, eliminating flash files and reducing the number of plugins you’ve added to your site. You can also make use of the cache for your site so it doesn’t have to fully reassemble every time someone visits.
2. Clickable Images and Logos
Many of your visitors will want to visit many different pages of your website and have gone from page to page without returning to the homepage. This means they will have the click back several times before getting to the homepage, which can be inconvenient. Instead make it easy, make all logos clickable so users can navigate with ease.
3. White Space
We’ve talked about white space in several blog posts but it needs to be mentioned here again. Your text matters but the spacing between your text matters too. White space helps your users absorb the information you’re providing and it’s aesthetically pleasing and inviting too. White space can also be used to help the most important elements of your website stand out and become more noticeable.
4. Search Friendly
Note we’re saying SEARCH friendly not search engine friendly. SEO matters but it has no role to play in your UX and in fact all this point means is that you should ensure you have a functional search bar on each page of your site. A search bar allows your potential customers to seek and find exactly what they’re looking for.
5. Responsive
We’ve already dedicated a whole blog post to responsive design but once again it needs to be mentioned. You want your customers to be able to access your website, whatever device they choose to use and this includes those with smaller screens. To ensure this is possible you need to ensure your design is responsive as this allows your design to adapt to any screen and be perfectly accessible and usable in every context.
These five elements of your website can really help or hinder your UX. You want your potential customers to find your site easy to use as well as being impressed by its design so ensure you keep these points in mind for success across the board.
If you would like to find out more or have any questions then please get in touch with The Web Surgery.