Your business’ website can leave a lasting impression on your customer, and whether that impression is good or bad can depend on various factors. A good online presence is as essential as having a neat and appealing storefront; a business’ website is its face. Nowadays, users are shrewd about web design and have come to expect a certain level of sophistication.

The elements required for a successful website have changed and developed over the years. As the bar rises higher, many businesses, especially small ones may feel overwhelmed by expectations to provide a properly designed website user experience. However, enhancing a website user experience is not as tough as it may seem, and even little efforts can make a huge difference.

What is User Experience

Website user experience (UX) refers to the set of behaviors that customers display when interacting with a website.

A website’s UX primary goal is for each user to have a positive interaction with a product or service on the site. Whether the interaction solves a problem, provides entertainment, or helps the user find critical information, the experience should leave the user feeling fulfilled.

There are many factors that influence website user experience which in turn can make or break your business. They are:

• Usefulness — Does your website satisfy users’ requirements?
• Credibility — Does your brand identity, content, and/or service build the trust and belief of the user?
• Desirability — Does your brand strike an emotional chord with the user?
• Usability — Is your website easy to use?
• Accessibility — Can people with disabilities access your website?
• Value — Does your content/product/service make their time spent on the website worthwhile?
• Navigation — Is your website easily navigable?

Table of Contents

• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and responsive
• Improve the speed of your website pages
• Use chatbots
• Avoid page not found errors (404’s)
• Request minimal information for sign-up or surveys
• Use of white space
• Keep things simple

1. Make Sure Your Site is Mobile Friendly and Responsive

Advancements in mobile technologies have enabled more people to browse the web on multiple devices. More people use their smartphones for Internet access than any other device, and Google has adopted a mobile-first approach. If your website appears unresponsive on a smaller device and it’s difficult to navigate, this is only going to result in an increase in your bounce rate. Your website needs to adapt based on the device that the user is viewing it from to ensure a positive engagement rate. Thankfully, it’s not hard to implement. You can find plenty of mobile-friendly WordPress themes to work with.

2. Improve the speed of your website pages

There is nothing more frustrating than being on a website that takes forever to load. Today’s internet users lack patience and they expect your website to load within a matter of seconds. Your website’s loading page speed is very imperative so that if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load 53 percent of people will leave your site. With every second your website needs to load the bounce rate increases.

Here’s what you can start with:

• Optimize images for the web.
• Minify CSS & JS.
• Use caching.
• Don’t include too many external scripts.
• Don’t use too many plug-ins in WordPress.
• Find a hosting service with a CDN.

You can also use one of the free tools that are available to determine how long your site currently takes to load. 

3. Use Chatbots

There are multiple channels of communication with customers. Apart from FAQ pages, you can create internal wikis and help portals where users can search for issues they want to resolve. When this fails, most companies resort to directing users to customer support.

You can save your customer service team time by using chatbots. You can create a chatbot to answer frequently asked questions, guide users through the site, or even create a sales chatbot.

4. Avoid ‘Page Not Found’ Errors (404’s)

Almost every user gets annoyed at the 404 or page not found message. If a user gets the message, then he/she might leave the sight immediately or rethink getting back to your site next time because it portrays incompetency, which speaks of the website user experience you’re providing. If you cannot redirect the user to the desired page, then maintaining a website is merely a waste. Slow loading of the pages or site is also a reason for Custom 404 Errors and a sign of a bad website user experience.

For those reasons, build a 404-page using a custom 404 template. It lets your user know that there is an error with their request. An effective 404 page will recognize the mistake and guide them back to relevant pages of the site.

5. Request Minimal Information For Sign-up or Surveys

A stress-free website user experience is great for your business, so you need to make sure the forms on your site are brief and straight to the point.

Many sites ask only for the first and last name along with the e-mail to just sign-up for the website or newsletter. We are in a fast-paced world with limited time schedules, so if you ask for personal details such as phone contact and home address on your signup or survey form, most of the users will quit without taking any action. So short and simple forms are acceptable for most of the users.

6. Use of white Spaces

This is one of the quickest and easiest ways to enhance your design. Even subtle amounts of whitespace will add elegance and simplicity to your website making it look polished.

There are plenty of ways you can increase the amount of whitespace on your website. For instance, you can increase white space in long blocks of text on the right and left margins, as this can enhance comprehension by as much as 20 percent.

Here are some ways you might use white space to boost the UX of your website:

• Increase the line space for your text in the body
• Increase white space in long text blocks on the left and right margins.it’s been shown to improve comprehension by up to 20%!
• Avoid putting images in line with text instead of positioning them on top or under text blocks.
• Group and surrounding related objects with white space

7. Keep things Simple

Last but not least is the importance of simplicity when designing an excellent website that provides a great usability design. Be sure that each page on your site has an unambiguous goal. Also, ensure that the purpose of each item or page is immediately easily understood by the user. The need for clarification should not be required. For non-essential data, it should be put at the bottom in order. There’s no reason to make things complicated in order to stand out. Keep things as simple and straightforward as possible to ensure there’s no confusion when visiting your site.

Conclusion

So there you have it; 7 Great tips to improve your website user experience. I hope these tips have given you some ideas on how you can revamp your website to be more user-friendly. The key to good UX design is making it work for both your users and your platform.

In essence, a well-designed user experience is about leading a user to the data or resources they need, while cutting off everything that might stand in their path. While the goal seems to be universally understood, it can be a little bit complicated to achieve.

Losintech is a versatile web design and development company. We offer comprehensive and cost-effective web solutions for individuals & enterprises, irrespective of their size. Contact  us to see how we can improve your website’s UX or for any website-related services.