Tips to improve your Website’s User Experience

What do you feel is more important, driving more traffic to your website or converting/keeping the traffic once it gets there?

Both are correct. With user experience optimization, you can deal with both the challenges at the same time. In this article, I will let you know the significance of user experience optimization and the ways to optimize it to bring and keep more visitors.

User Experience??

User experience(UX) is the way your customers and visitors navigate through your website. The customers will get frustrated, and they won’t come back if the organizations fail to deliver a positive experience. Few companies devote energy and time to making the website better for returning and new customers. This will have a high effect on your sales and SEO that you are not even viewing.

The Business Impact on Good User Experience

UX doesn’t provide direct revenue. So, the owners will be cautious in investing in this. It is possible to calculate the exact business impact on enhancing your UX.

Load Speed affects the site traffic

On your website, every second will count when it comes to loading time. A web page is expected to load in 2 secs or fewer by 47% of customers, and if a website takes beyond 3 seconds to load, 40% abandon that site according to KISSmetrics. How can you afford to lose 40% of traffic on your site? It shouldn’t happen. You must focus on website optimization to make sure your site satisfies the customers who are trying to access it.

Good user experience improves revenue and conversion rates

Loading times relate directly to conversion rates along with site traffic. The conversion rates downgrade by 12% for every extra second your page is taking to load. Your revenue increases by 3.2% if your page loading speed increases by 2 to 4 seconds. Good user experience implies you spend very less time waiting for the information to load and more time in checking out items on your site. Good user experience provides you with an extra amount of time to spend on the website so that you can see more things than the usual.

The factors of UX that affect SEO

User experience affects how often the customers find you. SEO and UX are tied closely with each other, this implies the number of people visiting your website will become very small if your site is difficult to use, clunky and slow.

The search engines will consider certain metrics to determine the overall satisfaction with the site and its usability factors. Your site will struggle to rank well if these factors are worse when compared with the factors of your competitor sites. Google will not highlight a slowly loading website; this implies all your linking, keyword and content efforts will be of no value.

The Optimization of User Experience for Visitors

When your metrics reveal that your website needs enhancement, you need to enhance the usability of your site. The below steps will let you know about the required changes.

Increasing Load Speed

You cannot give excuses for a website that is loading slowly. A list of 16 tools is created by KeyCDN to evaluate the speed of your site and look for problems within it.

You have few options based on your brand to boost the website speed.

Optimize your video, code, and images to make sure it is not slowing down your pages. Even if your site has amazing images, no one will wait to see them if it takes more than the usual amount of time to load. Ensure you cut the bulk for better loading time.

Tease content for quicker loading times. Once, see a website like Mashable that loads the starting few paragraphs and if the customer wants to read the remaining content, he is asked to click. This helps the site to load quicker, and it also enables them to track how much percentage of visitors bounced and how many clicked to read more.

Clear out bulky widgets, apps, cookies, and plug-ins that are slowing down the time for loading. These add-ons will prevent the audience from seeing your content if they are triggered first. To remove obsolete additions, conduct a “code purge” for every six months.

Streamline the Conversion or Checkout Process

When the visitors of your site decide to buy a product or fill out an interest form, they have already admitted that they want the service or product. All that happens between the customers deciding they need the product, and they buy it depends on UX.

Limit the required fields to the least.

Use auto-fill tools. If the complete form is filled out by the customer in just a few clicks, he is more likely to advance to the next page.

Test the single-page checkout processes. Instead of having a new page loaded for credit card information and shipping address, test serving all the fields at a single time. By doing this way, they won’t have to navigate through multiple pages in their process of buying.

Your content must be kept scannable

Try to design your website pages in a way that engages the reader unless you use a hyper-niche website where your visitors are focused on long-form and unbroken content.

Place the highly significant information at the front – this will let the audience know the content’s purpose and what they knowledge they will acquire from it.

Include sharing icons so that the visitors can highlight products or parts and share them with their friends on social media.

Break up the content with block quotes, images and subheads so they can acquire the gist and skip the parts that are unnecessary.

Test your content with A/B testing across many pages or generate a single long page that loads as the visitors scroll. You are looking to view who finishes the article and fills the interest forms after reading.

You must always look to find ways to make your website look better and back your theories about what makes a site decent through metric tracking and A/B testing. If you try to improve continuously, you will never fall behind.

User Experience is an Ongoing Process

A business owner is never done when it comes to enhancing the UX of your website. At least 10% of the budget must be allocated for improving the user experience. This is because the website best practices are constantly changing. With the rise of social media platforms and smartphones, what was exciting and modern just four years ago is outdated now.

The customers are continuously changing the way they search, which implies Google is laying down the standards for how websites must run. Your website will be outdated and clunky one year from now even if you consider it “completely optimized” this year. A usability expert’s work is never done; what you can do is only hope to make the visitors of your website happy by continuously improving it.