You may offer the most awesome product or service in the world, but if your website leaves a bad impression on your visitors, you’d be hard-pressed to convert them into paying customers. If you think about it, your website is responsible for setting a good first impression upon your visitors.
A well-designed, highly functional site can be a powerful tool in building trust, boosting your brand, and ultimately getting visitors to convert. With all this on the line, it’s crucial to do everything possible to improve the user experience on your website. Read on for tips on how to do just that with a few simple adjustments.
Tips for Creating a Remarkable Website and Improving User Experience
Current research reveals that 97% of business websites fail at delivering a quality user experience. That percentage is linked with almost 90% of online businesses failing within 120 days of launch.
With those staggering statistics in mind, it should be clear that making every effort to improve user experience is crucial to your online business success. Here are a few areas you can tweak to improve how your visitors engage and behave on your website.
Improve Your Content
No matter how technology advances or how much the internet expands, content is still king. Content in the form of blog posts and videos is still the number one way internet users find businesses online through search engines.
Considering this, it’s essential to improve the content on your website by keeping it current and engaging. Furthermore, make sure your posts offer clear value and are easy to read. Avoid grammatical errors and create articles that are personable as well as solve problems for your readers.
Keep it Simple
Internet searchers rely completely upon appearances when choosing to buy online. Therefore, the best rule of thumb is to keep your business website design as simple as possible. Too many moving parts, flashy bits, or fancy fonts may come off as distracting – or worse, confusing for the user.
Try to stick to a theme with no more than three complimentary colors. The same holds true with typefaces. Opt for readable fonts, and keep to 3 or fewer different font styles (header, subheader, and body text). Also, make your images beautiful and engaging as well as placed pleasingly within your written content.
As you likely already know, navigation is how visitors move about your website. It’s critical that navigation is simple, easy-to-use, and consistent throughout your website. Use a basic header menu that makes sense.
If you have a lot of content, you may want to add a left or right side-bar menu for additional ways users can navigate your content. Also, be sure to add a clearly visible search feature, as this is a convenient way your users can find what they’re looking for on your site.
Make it Fast
When it comes to the loading time of your business website, every second counts. In fact, a recent study by KissMetrics shows that 73% of visitors admit to clicking out of a website if it is too slow to load. If you’re using WordPress, there are a myriad of different plugins you can utilize in order to speed your loading time.
Furthermore, look into getting the fastest WordPress hosting service for your blog, or a dedicated server for your business website. Try to avoid plugins or widgets that do not work well with your content management system, as these tend to slow websites down. Also, keep all updates current on your website to optimize your load times.
Be Easily Accessible
Your potential customers need an easy way to reach you. Therefore, make your “contact” button clearly visible. Also, make sure your contact form is fully functional. And while it should go without saying, always make every effort to respond to inquiries as quickly as possible.
You can even go a step further and install a chat feature on your website. This allows visitors to get immediate answers to their questions about your business offerings.
The Last Word on Creating the Best User Experience for Your Business Website
When it comes to landing a sale, your objective is to compel, engage, and entice your visitors to buy. This is done through smart web design, great content, and fast site speed.
While everybody has their own tastes and preferences, one thing is true – people know quality when they see it, and they appreciate simplicity. So keep this in mind as you continue to improve user experiences for your business website.
