Your potential customers and clients have more options than ever before in today’s digital world. Whenever they need anything, they can find whatever they’re looking for on their phones or their computers. Every business has to use their website as a way to convince customers and clients to choose them over everyone else. One of the most important things you can do when it comes to your website is make sure the user experience is excellent. So how do you improve the user experience? Here are some tips. 

1. Minimize your page load time.

Everyone is busy. No one has time to sit around and wait for your page to load. They want the information they are looking for fast. If they aren’t getting it, typically, they will just leave the page and go to the next one. So you want to make sure your page speed is as fast as it can be. 

You also want to compress your images before loading them onto your page. One of the leading causes of slow page speed is image size. You can use a website like compressor.io to dramatically speed up your site. 

Not sure what the performance of your website is? You can check this as well as other qualities like usability, SEO, and social media with our free website audit tool.

2. Use clear calls to action.

A call to action can be a banner, button, icon, text link, or sentence that asks you to take some action (i.e. “read more,” “download our e-book,” “call us,” etc.) The action (the content) and mechanism (how it looks) of the CTA are separate things. A call to action that has both a unique mechanism and strong content leads to the best conversion rate. Here is an example from our own site:

You want users to know what they are supposed to do to buy your product or service or get in touch with you. Make sure you use attractive and clear calls to action. They should be in the right location, and they should be in a color that pops. 

3. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and responsive.

Across the world, about half of the web traffic is mobile. So if you’re website is not responsive or mobile friendly, you’re missing out on a lot of traffic. You may need to adjust some text on the mobile version so that the user sees what you need them to see within the first few seconds of looking at your page. You may need to also adjust form length on the mobile version of your site to make it shorter.

You’ll want to review your customer’s journey on both a desktop and mobile device to ensure the messaging remains in-tact through either entry point. The experience can be (and sometimes should be) different, but the actual messaging should remain consistent.

4. Give them the longer content on deep pages. 

The average person has an attention span of eight seconds. So you don’t want to clutter up the home page with a lot of text. Use menus and sub-menus to get them to the information they will want to know. Using long form content is a good thing to do, but you want to put the longer text on the deeper pages so that they can always read more and find out more if they want to. You want to give them all of the important information upfront. 

5. Add your social media links.

Your website should have clear buttons that link to all of your social media profiles, whether you’re on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or all of the above. You want to make sure they are in a clear and visible space so that users can easily navigate to them and check them out. 

6. Use white space.

White space is very important for a well designed website. It will make your content more readable, and it gives users the ability to focus on the areas that are directly around the text. White space can increase a user’s attention by 20%. The white space will pull the user’s attention to the content and calls to action on the page.

7. Keep the important information above the fold. 

I mentioned above that the average person has an attention span of eight seconds. This means they don’t want to do a lot of scrolling. You want to make sure they can see all of the important information as they land on the page without scrolling. Users of the web actually spend 80% of their time observing the information above the page fold. 

I’m not saying users won’t ever scroll to see the rest of the information because they will if they are interested enough. With long form content, it’s impossible to keep it all above the fold. The important thing is that you want to give the user a reason to stay on the page, and putting the important information above the fold is a great way to do that.

These are just some of the tips that will help you to improve the user experience of your website. Do your research and find out what visitors to your website want to know. Give them that information quickly, and do everything you can to make your website run smoothly. 

 

WT Digital Agency is an Atlanta marketing agency specializing in brand development, content marketing, social media marketing, website design, SEO, and more. To learn more about what we do, click here.