How to Improve User Experience of your Website
User experience (UX) design is an important aspect for any business looking to build or re-design their website. Typical business goals are usually tied to views, leads generated and sales made — and all of these are in one way or another influenced by UX.
Usually UX design is associated with the visible part of the website. While physical aspects such as colour play a role in UX Design, the underlying user experience translates to more than how it looks — it’s more about a website’s functionality. Can visitors on your website find what they are looking for?
Improve Your Speed
The first tip to talk about focuses on the functionality of your website. When websites take longer than three seconds to load, users are likely to leave. According to data published by Google websites that take up to 6 seconds to load, have a very high chance to show a high bounce rate.
Losing visitors immediately means you lose a chance to engage with a potential customer. The best way to start this off is to use a page optimizer tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. The tool scans your website pages and gives you insights on how to tweak your website to improve your overall speed. Images also have a big impact on page speed and can be optimized accordingly.
Add Search Functionality
On-site search is a feature that is so simple, yet easy to miss. It’s one of those things that will be noticeable when you visit a website that doesn’t have a search function.
Users have completely different expectations for what their experience should be on a website, and finding exactly what they want quickly is at the top of the list. Introducing a search bar has proven to nearly double ecommerce conversion rates from 2.7% to 4.6%.
If you sell products online or have a blog, you should add search functionality to your website and improve your users’ quality of life.
Appeal to Your Mobile Audience
Mobile devices have changed the way we communicate, shop, and browse online. Already, most of the internet traffic comes through mobile devices. It’s a mobile world and having solely a desktop version of your website means missing out on most of your potential traffic. Even mobile-friendly websites that offer a compact version of the desktop site isn’t enough from a user experience point of view.
When you create your desktop website, ensure you have a mobile version or app as well. A great user experience means customers having access to your website from any device and getting the same high-quality experience.
