Your website is an essential element of establishing your business. Websites provide your customers with easy access to all the information they need to know about who you are, what you provide and how to connect with you. Without a website, your business cannot survive.
However, simply creating a website is no longer enough. In 2020, you must also provide a superb user experience. Visitors want a unique User Experience (UX) to elevate their overall browsing experience. To provide that experience, you need to understand some of the basic elements of a website that can transform your website from a dreary and forgettable collection of pages to a cohesive message that grabs attention and pulls people into your business.
Tips To Help Improve Your Website’s UX
- Responsive & Mobile-friendly
- Page Loading Time
- Website Security
- Bullet Points
- Use Attractive CTA
- Colour
- Motion and Animation
- Hamburger Menu
- Use High-Quality Images
- Add Videos
- Catch Your 404 errors
- White Space
- Well Written Headlines
- Consistency
- The Experience
Responsive & Mobile-friendly
Surveys show that most traffic is now directed via smartphones, making it essential that your site is responsive. Your website should be compatible with multiple device types and easily viewed on android or iOS. In addition to being responsive, your site should focus on quality. When people jump from their smartphone to their laptop, it should be obvious that they are looking at the same site adjusted for the device they are using to access your business. If you owned a brick-and-mortar franchise, you’d have common elements in each location so people could identify your store everywhere, and this is the same principle you want to apply to your website responsiveness.
Page Loading Time
Page loading time matters. If your page is slow, your traffic will depart. Page loading time helps people to decide if they are interested in visiting your site in future. If your site loads fast people feel that your site is responsive and not a waste of their time. Visitors are more likely to convert to sales if your site is fast.
If you are in WordPress you can follow the online guide about how to improve your loading time. However, your web hosting server is one of the main factors in page loading time. If you do a little research it is easy to find many providers, and finding the one that is right for your business should not take long; if the provider you are researching takes a long time to load, maybe it’s a sign.
Website Security
Site visitors want an assurance of the safety of their payment details saved on your website. While you must provide a certain pop-ups if you operate in some regions, site visitors are aware of the dangers that come with shopping online these days.
By providing evidence of robust site security, you can easily guarantee an exceptional browsing experience to the users. Displaying a security seal one way to assure visitors. However, the best way to assure users that your site is secure and that you understand the importance of protecting data is to actually do it. Just one security breach can destroy your business, so high-level security is a worthwhile investment. Dedicating a page on your site explaining how you ensure visitor security is another way that you can help to assure visitors, depending on the business that you are conducting online, this could be an essential part of your site credibility.
Bullet Points
Bullet points guide users to quick information about the key features of your business, products and services. Using icons or graphics to visually communicate bullet points also helps to make your site more attractive, adding dimension and space to a page.
Making shortlists of pertinent information for your visitors shows that you are wanting to engage your audience. It allows people to scan your site and learn what they need to fast, and determine if what they have found on your site is what they were searching for. As a business you want to provide solutions and answer questions, doing this as efficiently as possible is attractive to prospective clients, who are busy and need to find solutions.
Use Attractive CTA
You need a CTA (Call To Action) on every page and preferably above the fold. Visitors would not need to search in order to contact you or access your service. Making your CTA clear and accessible means easy conversions. Contacting your business and making purchases on your website should not be a challenge for your visitor, because if it is, they will seek solutions elsewhere.
Colour
Choose your colour palette wisely. Take time to think about the emotion you want your website to convey. Read about colour psychology, then understand colour theory before building a site. If you want to convey a sense of calm, choose soothing colours. If you want to evoke a sense of urgency, use vibrant colours. There are countless articles about how to use colour to elicit a response, and it is an important part of your site design not just for the aesthetic, but for conversions too.
Motion and Animation
Including motion and animations can help in attracting site users towards a call to action. Clever use of subtle movement can draw the eye towards something you want visitors to remember. For example, a site that promotes clean oceans might use a whale spouting water to highlight essential tips about how to protect waterways, or an online clothing store might use a boomerang image to show how clothing moves on a model.
Hamburger Menu
Hamburger menus are a clean way of indicating that there is more to discover on your website. People are tech-savvy and know to look for a menu at the top of a page, using a hamburger style menu means that you have more space for taglines, special offer banners or white space to calm the visual experience.
Use High-Quality Images
Images help to communicate a message quickly, however, if the image is poor quality the message you send can fall flat. Choose high-resolution images that can be manipulated to work on all devices. Avoid using stock images where possible. Images give your site a feel and often site visitors will make a snap judgement based on your image content before glancing at your written content. Your images should be consistent with your written message, they should be modern and inviting and understand the trends of the industry in which you are working, while also conforming with your colour palette.
Add Videos
People trust a realistic experience and videos can add to a sense of authenticity. Your website is a story for your visitor to experience. You want your visitor to understand your offering, connect with your brand and convert to sales. Offering video footage that is relevant to your sales story can increase visitor retention rates and bolster your brand recognition. Just as a TV advertisement communicates a message, so can a video on your website. You can show how a new product works, make a tour of your factory, or record an interview that humanises your business. Videos can be evergreen content, so they are worth investing in to add depth to your website.
Catch Your 404 errors
Having a 404 error appear in a search will drive potential site visitors away faster than a fart in an elevator. Fixing ‘not found’ errors is easy, and finding them is as simple as ensuring that you conduct regular QA tests. No client should ever be lost because of a 404 error.
White Space
White space makes content more legible and helps site users to focus on other elements of the website. Understanding how to balance content and space is an art that takes time to master – too much space feels empty and weak, too little space feels overcrowded and busy. Part of understanding how much white space to use is also about knowing what message you want to convey. A busy site can create urgency and drive sales when well crafted, and a quiet site can attract visitors and convert sales in a more considered way. Some international fast-fashion websites use huge amounts of white space and allow images to communicate the message, while online warehouses tend to overwhelm visitors and force them into a CTA.
Well Written Headlines
Headlines are used to establish a connection with potential customers. Communicating key points in a few words can be tricky, however, getting it right will mean connecting with visitors and attracting customers. Keywords also help in website search engine rankings. Headlines are given more weight by search engines, so including the right keywords improve your SEO.
Consistency
Your website should appear as a whole work. Each page should make use of consistent elements, it should all pull together in a branded package that invites visitors on a journey. Colour, CTAs, content voice, images and the overall message should be obvious to the visitor as they move through your website. A page should never feel disjointed, include your policies pages that should conform to font, style and colour guidelines that you’ve created.
The Experience
Website visitors have high expectations. They are easy to meet when you take the time to consider the importance of a website. Businesses that are not taking UX or even online presence seriously are unlikely to continue long into the 2020s. Consider that your site is the story of your business, make it customer-centric and invite potential clients to get to know you on a virtual platform. C2B and B2B customers are seeking answers from businesses that understand the current climate in which every person wants their customer experience to feel personalised and unique. To give people that experience, your site UX needs to be inviting, functional and consistent.
