How To Improve User Experience On Your Website

We’re not in the early days of the internet anymore, so there’s simply no excuse for a poor running website. 

User experience (UX) is among the most valued concepts in web building these days, and it’s no surprise that demand for skilled UX designers far outweighs demand. Poor performance will lead your customers to bounce straight off your site into your competitor’s arms, and search engines will punish you further.

But don’t panic just yet! There’s a lot you can do with powerful tools and the right strategies. In this article, we’ll combine the two to help you improve website user experience and watch that revenue rise.

FAQs:

Website builders: Choose the path of least resistance

To kick off this list, we’ll start with the initial creation of your website. If you overcomplicate things at the beginning, you’ll find yourself running into bugs and wasting valuable time putting out fires in the long run.

When starting out on a site, it is far easier to turn to a website builder, rather than embarking on the mammoth task of building everything yourself, start-to-finish. The best tools come with sector-specific templates that you can choose from, and these tried-and-tested sites are a secure way to improve website user experience. The best part of these tools is that you don’t need any coding experience. Having been on the market for some time now, website builders are super simple to use and can turn a daunting task into a piece of cake. 

For more fine-tuned UX, you can easily integrate with Google Analytics and other tracking software to get an idea of how your website is performing and how your users are interacting with it. 

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Don’t neglect the mobile version!

Of course you can enhance your user experience on mobile with a dedicated app, but there will be users who won’t download it and prefer to go into their browser. Part of creating a better website user experience is making sure people can reach you however they want on responsive sites.

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, external website builders are a great way of matching your desktop performance on smartphones. Almost all of the products on the market now match the desktop compatibility or provide an easy drag-and-drop system for you to make adjustments. 

This is especially important for small teams who want to make an impact. Creating a desktop, mobile, and app version of your website from scratch takes three teams — quite an investment. So save yourself the potential minefield of cost, bugs, and poor performance and stick to the templates.

Identify and measure your website user experience metrics

If you want to improve the website user experience, you need to know what to measure. This applies both to the biggest multinationals and small businesses — the tools to track aren’t as expensive as you think. 

Good KPIs to measure include the bounce rate, time on page, percentage of conversions, and user error rate. They are all interconnected, so don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. For example, if your time on page is lower than expected, but you’re converting 50%, that’s no bad thing. It means users are generally so eager to sign up that they don’t even stop to see what’s on the page.

Bold, attractive CTAs

Calls to action are the stepping stones you want your users to step over on their journey through your pages. Therefore, one way to improve website user experience is to use design and text to make your stepping stones as clear as possible. 

Take the time with your graphic designers to set standard CTAs that users can recognize in an instant. Make sure they are bold and bright to draw attention, but stick within your brand guidelines. To make things even more interesting, take a look at the psychology of color schemes to see what designs might inspire trust or action. 

The text is crucial too. "Find out more" "more info" are two great examples of fluffy calls to action that don't inspire your audience. Instead, think about your customer journey. Rather than offering more information, get your users to "download the e-book". With a decisive, clear verb in there, you can link to a brief form, collect a name and an email address, and send your e-book via email.

Use white space to your advantage

When you’re looking to improve website user experience, don’t fall into the trap of filling every gap with content. A page cluttered with content feels click-baity and can lead to a lack of trust. However, more and more websites are going for that minimalist look — a pure white background that doesn’t distract from your headers, descriptions, and CTAs.

When thinking about how to improve UX, put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What exactly do you want them to do? Will an extra design flourish add any value to their experience or distract from the journey you want them to follow? These kinds of questions should inform you on the aspects you want to highlight, and those that would be better left out.

Enhance user experience by adding padding with white space to lift your content and make it more visible. This padding subtly nudges your users to where you want them to look, and makes text more readable when they arrive there. When it comes to CTAs, make them bold, appealing, and highly visible in your white space. 

Less is more

There are very few websites aimed at showcasing literary flair. We live in a world that is too fast-paced, especially when it comes to e-commerce and online sales.

To improve website user experience, forget the flowing prose and use bullet points to detail the specifications of your products. If you get into the mind of your users, they only really want to know if they’re in the right place for what they want. Bullet points act like signposts, providing neat, concise information in a uniform format across your entire range. 

This golden rule also applies when asking your users to act. Whether it’s sign up forms or feedback surveys, strip things down to the essentials and you will welcome far more submissions than exhaustive forms. Many smart forms on the market allow you to use cookies to customize your forms. Got an email address the first time round? Next time the form will ask for a phone number.

Improve your page speed

When pages take long to load, users tend to drift away. You can always create a better website user experience by improving your page speed, and with faster, more user-friendly pages, you will see your bounce rate drop and your conversions climb. 

When considering more technical ways to improve your website’s user experience, Google Analytics and Search Console are tools you’ll need to get comfortable with.

Google’s webmaster tools are free to use and will analyze the speed of your mobile and desktop website speeds. You can take immediate action with tips offered by Google, but there are infinite ways you can cut loading speed down. From the format of your images to the amount of redirects and how well your code has been optimized, your tech teams can improve your speed in multiple ways.

Images: Relevant, original, optimized

A picture tells a thousand words, as they say. Make sure the images on your website tell an engaging story about your products, not a tale of an unprofessional outfit. 

One way to improve website user experience is to get multiple professional photos of all your products so your users know what to expect when they purchase. They should all follow the same branded style for a classy look, but highlight the differences of each item. 

If what you’re selling is less tangible, such as education, avoid stock images like the plague. Customers can spot stock images immediately and they create a sense of mistrust. Instead, take photos of your students in action and use them to convince others to enroll.

Finally, optimize your images. By saving images as JPEG or WebP rather than PNG, you can retain more than enough quality with a much lighter file size. From there, you can compress them before uploading them to your site, which will further increase your page loading speed.

High quality images are now an essential part of a customer’s decision to buy, so focus on them as a priority. 

Be consistent with your formatting

You can seriously improve website user experience simply by keeping things consistent. Whether it’s font, headings, image style, and link designs, everything should be instantly recognizable to your users. Some of these apply to the web as a whole, such as blue underlined text for links, and others can be specific to your brand, such as color schemes and fonts. 

Aside from inspiring trust in your users, consistency in headers and layout is easy for search engines to follow, meaning you’re more likely to rank high in SERPs. And, if it’s easy for robots to track, it’s easy for humans and screen readers too. 

It’s very easy for creative members of your team to see this consistency as a drawback, squashing their ideas for an arty website. However, when you need to improve user experience, formatting rules are a framework they simply have to work within. 

Keep an eye on those 404s

While formatting is important for both humans and robots, 404 pages can be off-putting for humans, even if web trackers are more forgiving.

Trying to navigate a site and finding yourself at a dead end before you can make a purchase is frustrating for your users and they are very likely to close the tab and look elsewhere. 

You can improve website user experience by integrating your pages with Google tools. These will periodically send crawlers around your site to identify dead links and 404 pages. Set up notifications to receive alerts whenever this happens and get your tech team to work immediately to resolve the issue. 

With a free-flowing site, you can enhance user experience which will ultimately increase confidence and boost sales.

Offer your customers a contact center

Your website is ultimately a marketing tool. It’s your digital market stall where you showcase your products to as many people as possible. But the whole point of a market stall is interaction. Yes, you want people to come and buy straight away, but a lot of your clients will have questions they need to be answered first.

FAQ pages have their place, but it’s the personal interaction that really helps you improve website user experience. It’s becoming common practice now for websites to include a chatbot widget — a partially automated text box where users can get their questions answered in an instant. Your chatbot is integrated with your CRM, where your team in the contact center will be on hand to respond to multiple requests at the same time.

The mission to improve website user experience is by its very nature a never-ending one. Just think about the top websites of the year 2000 compared to now to get an idea. With improvements in technology and the ever-adjusting metrics of the top search engines, it can be hard to keep up.

However, with the right tools, you can launch a quality site — even if you’re a small company. 

Bitrix24 offers myriad features to improve UX, starting with its comprehensive website builder. Unlimited pages and free hosting are impressive enough, but with built-in forms, a CRM, live chat, and SEO tools, you can compete with the best.

More than 10,000,000 organizations already use Bitrix24 as an all-in-one solution to their business needs, and with free sign up, what have you got to lose? Register for Bitrix24 today and see how it can drive your business forward.