How To Make Your Website More User-Friendly
One of the main tenets of good web design is user-friendliness. With a massive amount of websites on any given topic, not having a user-friendly site can easily send potential customers away. By putting some necessary time and work into their websites, many of our clients have seen a boost in conversions, a decrease in their bounce rate, and even some SEO advantages. With the following tips, you can make your website more user-friendly.
1. Fast Load Time
The first step to a user friendly website is a fast load time. If your site takes more than five seconds to load, it is highly likely that users will give up and move on to the next site. While exploring the new website designs, we have seen problems with long load times due to a high use of images, video, moving pieces, etc. By implementing some simple strategies, you can cut down load time, and see positive customer interaction improvements. Decrease your load time by eliminating flash, compressing images, and limiting large files.
2. An Inviting Landing Page
As the first impression of your brand, the landing page is key to encouraging users to continue browsing your website. Most users make a decision to stay, or click away within seconds, which means your landing page has to be on point. A landing page can be any major page on your website, ranging from your homepage, to a popular product category that you offer. If you have to make the decision of a few pages to improve, take a look at your web traffic. Your web traffic will show you which pages are the most visited, and most critical. Focus on creating intriguing design on these pages, and get your message across quickly! If done right, your landing pages can help increase your SEO, and overall brand recognition in search engines.
3. Simple Navigation
The navigation of your website is one of the most important aspects of the user experience, and it is often the most overlooked. A complicated navigational structure will leave users feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, and unable to find the products that they are looking to purchase. This causes obvious issues when it comes to converting web traffic to sales. By implementing UX (user experience) design and strategy, you can create a simplified navigation that makes it easy for your customers to travel through your site.
4. Accessibility
A truly user-friendly website is accessible to all, including those who are disabled, blind, or elderly. To make your site accessible, ensure that it is optimized for those using screen-readers.
5. Mobile Optimization
With mobile web traffic increasing every day, your website needs to be optimized for mobile devices, making it easy to view on smartphones and tablets. This can be achieved through multiple ways. Read our articles on Responsive Web Design, and Mobile Commerce.
6. Readable, Relevant Content
User-friendly website content is both readable and relevant. Focus on fonts that are easy to read, a simple color scheme, and good spacing to eliminate clutter. Google has also recently made it very clear that they are looking for content, content, and more content. This means unique content will help your SEO rankings! If you have a blog, use it.
Have any questions about what you read? Contact your AppMe Solutions representative today!
