10 Simple Tips to Improve User Experience on Your Website
Updated March 2024
Do You Want to Provide a Better User Experience?
Are you a business owner or professional looking to enhance the user experience on your website? Look no further! This blog post will provide you with 10 straightforward and effective tips to improve user experience.
Implementing these strategies can help you create a website that captures your visitors’ attention and keeps them coming back for more. So, let’s dive in and discover how to optimize your website to deliver an exceptional user experience.
Why You Must Improve User Experience on Your Website
You already know that providing your customers and clients with a fantastic experience is essential to running a business. But you may not realize that providing excellent customer service in person or over the phone is not enough.
Many of your customers will encounter your business online first, so every aspect of your website must provide visitors with a fantastic user experience (UX). Putting user experience first leads to lower bounce rates, higher conversion rates, and better sentiment toward your brand.
In this blog post, we’ll show you how to improve your website’s user experience by focusing on your users’ needs and concerns and anticipating their needs proactively.
Benefits of Good User Experience Design
Good news for you! Improving user experience on your website delivers some key benefits for your business, including:
Benefit #1 – Lower Bounce Rates
A high bounce rate indicates visitors are frustrated with your site or not finding what they want. A lower percentage is good, and it is often only possible when the page is easy to access and use.
Bounce rate (n): The percentage of visitors who visit a page and leave the website rather than viewing another page.
Bounce rate is one of the numbers we look at when your website doesn’t generate the leads you need or expect. It can show us exactly which pages are driving users away. And which pages are more successful in encouraging users to stay on your site longer.
Benefit #2 – Higher Conversion Rates
Conversion and bounce rates go hand in hand. When talking about your website, it’s important to note that conversion doesn’t have to mean that a lead suddenly bought your product or signed up for your service (and converted to a customer).
It can simply mean they clicked on a call to action or filled out a form to learn more about your business.
Every business wants a website with high conversion rates. It means that users of your site are interested, and those small conversion steps they take on your site can lead to them becoming paying customers.
Benefit #3 – More Loyal Customers
Loyal or repeat customers are a huge factor that many businesses don’t consider in their marketing efforts.
Your ultimate goal in marketing is not to turn a lead into a customer but to turn customers into repeat customers. Repeat customers are every business’ dream: a strong following of people who love their product, leave positive reviews and share it with other potential customers.
Happy customers often become repeat customers, which means more sales over time with less effort. A website that provides a good user experience is one way to help people have a more positive association with your business.
9 Simple Tips to Improve User Experience
Throughout this article, we will use these three key factors listed above to highlight how each step can benefit your users and your business. You’ll learn why focusing on user experience is a compelling way to gain happier customers, increase sales, and build a strong base of loyal customers.
1. Optimize Your Website
Factors such as page load speed and mobile responsiveness considerably affect user experience. User experience, in turn, has consequences on revenue.
For instance, high expectations regarding website page load speed mean that a visitor is less likely to buy from it when a site is slow.
If a page has a high bounce rate, there’s also a good chance it doesn’t load quickly enough. Bounce rates increase by 50% if your website takes 2 seconds extra to load. After a 3-second loading time, 40% of users will back out of the site.
That means if your bounce rate is at a staggering 90%, it could be as low as 50-60% (a much more reasonable range) if only it loaded faster.
But what exactly is slowing down your website? There are many possibilities. Suppose you worked with an inexperienced designer or developer to create your site. In that case, they might not have properly compressed files and cleaned up any errors in their code. If you used a free website tool, all those fancy themes and extra plugins could teem with elements that dramatically slow down your site.
Some common culprits of a slow page load include:
- Large image sizes added to the site
- Embedded videos
- An inadequate web hosting server
- Poorly coded plugins
- External scripts
- Improper compression
Are you curious to see how fast your site is? There are plenty of page speed testing and monitoring tools out there that will help you do just that.
If your site takes longer than 2-3 seconds to load, there’s a good chance that your bounce rates suffer because of it.
If enabling compression or dealing with external scripts sounds like work that’s more technical than you’re comfortable with, the good news is that we handle all of this for you.
Here are some of the ways we tackle slow site speeds:
Use a lightweight theme
Many WordPress themes contain bloated code and scripts, slowing your website performance. Speed is decisive in creating a smooth user experience and can greatly impact your conversions. A fast-loading website is also a must if you want to rank highly in Google.
We recently rebuilt our website using a lightweight theme. We immediately noticed a significant improvement in page speed and user experience.
Suppose you want to improve the user experience on your website. In that case, you may want to consider one of the lightweight themes in this comparison.
Get fast web hosting
Many site owners focus on the cheapest website hosting option. That may save them a few dollars, but what about the cost of lost sales? You need to focus on website hosting to improve user experience on your website.
There are several different types of website hosting. Which option is best for you depends on your business and your website.
Compress your images
One critical thing we do is optimize your website’s images. One study found that 90% of slow websites have unoptimized images.
Ideally, your images should be as small as possible while maintaining quality. Therefore, we aim for optimized image sizes of 500kb or less.
Eliminate unnecessary plugins
Sometimes, improving site speed means deep diving into the back end of your CMS or website platform to investigate more technical and code-related issues.
We often deal with a site that uses an excessive number of plugins. Many site owners focus on adding all the latest tools and functionality. And that can work against them. We recommend limiting plugins to the essentials, using tested and reliable plugins, and always focusing on the user experience your site provides.
2. Consider Mobile Users
You’d have a mobile-first website in an ideal world, meaning it can scale up or down to fit any screen size (whether a desktop, tablet, or smartphone). But a responsive design isn’t something you can have with just an easy click.
Still, the fastest way to turn mobile and tablet users away from your site is to ignore how it functions on these devices. For example, many mobile users will abandon your site if a mobile user has to zoom in to view your site on their device or if your buttons are too small for them to click quickly.
Mobile-first web design best practices include:
- Ensure the font size is large enough to read on a small device. You don’t want your user to have to zoom in, especially on buttons, since the screen likely won’t let them zoom in and click simultaneously. Tablet and mobile users use their fingers instead of a mouse, so it’s essential to ensure that everything has more padding to keep things comfortable.
- Stick to one main focus for each page. Mobile device screen size is extremely limited, and cluttering too many things onto the screen quickly frustrates mobile users. We typically emphasize white space, minimalism, and one key focus for each page.
- Including a mobile menu. On a desktop, your navigation probably stretches horizontally across the top of the screen. On a mobile menu, it’s all about the vertical. Suppose a user can tap on a button that displays the menu vertically down their mobile screen. In that case, they can navigate around your site much more quickly.
- Reduce the size of your forms and include functionality that auto-generates the right keyboard for each field. For example, if you have a field for “zip code,” the ideal situation is for the keyboard to load a number pad when the user clicks on it. However, users can get frustrated if they input a number manually.
3. Incorporate AI-Driven Web Design
Using artificial intelligence to design a website will help you attract more consumers and improve the user experience by providing prompt responses. AI algorithms can analyze user data in real-time to deliver personalized content, recommend products, and optimize website interfaces based on user interactions.
AI-driven analytics can process vast amounts of data to identify trends, predict user behavior, and inform strategic decision-making in web development. Businesses can easily learn customers’ needs and preferences and create personalized experiences. Many websites today leverage AI-powered platforms to simplify navigation and instantly offer recommendations or solutions.
4. Use Layout Strategically
Layout plays a huge role in your website’s page. Without it, your website would be a wall of text and links, and no one would care to read through it. A good layout improves user experience by creating a better experience. Without a layout, users can become frustrated when there’s too much content on the screen, making it overwhelming and stressful, resulting in someone just leaving the website.
UX-focused web design is essential in 2024. While the desired result involves lead generation, higher traffic, and conversions, the journey to getting there is focused on the visitors. Each interaction or touchpoint on the website is designed with the user in mind.
When it comes to styles, brutalism continues to rise in 2024. Brutalism involves a natural and minimalist approach to layouts focusing on user experience. Alternatively, a beautiful, artistic site can go a long way in establishing your brand as a market leader and a true risk-taker.
If you want to be more conservative, thinking about how a layout can help visitors understand the information presented is the way to go.
Other trends that have emerged are minimalism and broken-grid layouts. These trends also highlight the importance of reducing clutter, which we will discuss in more detail later in the text.
5. Focus on Information Architecture
Visitors go to websites intending to get information. The previous statement might seem redundant, but some businesses don’t understand this based on their web design.
Provide elegant and structured information to ensure users get what they need. Today, web designers seem to be gravitating toward simpler designs. Many are implementing bullet-point lists to convey information and are experiencing great results.
While 55% of users look at lists without bullet points, 70% look at lists with bullet points. Providing information is also profitable, as businesses can successfully convey the intended message and draw attention to appropriate elements.
6. Use Clear Calls to Action
Focusing on big-picture elements like the look, feel, and page layout can make it easy to forget about calls to action. However, calls to action are crucial elements of your website design and deserve particular attention.
Every page on your website needs at least one clear, compelling call to action—a link, form, or button that helps users take the next step. A call to action can be as simple as linking to your services page from your homepage or as complex as offering an online scheduling tool to secure an appointment.
There’s also an excellent chance that many of your pages will have the same call to action. Most commonly, businesses want to send users to their contact page. If this describes you, we would likely have a call to action that leads to your contact page from nearly every page on your website.
CTAs should be considered critically during the design process. Some pages are better suited to specific calls to action. Every business website is different, so we never take a blanket approach to your customers’ user experience.
Here are some ideas for calls to action that we’ve included in some of our previous projects:
- An option to subscribe to your blog or newsletter
- A link to your contact page with a form for the user to fill out
- Links to other pages on your site with more information on a topic
- Downloadable PDFs (spec sheets, product catalogs, and helpful guides)
- An online scheduling tool that allows the user to make an appointment
- A link to log into your website (as an employee, paid user, volunteer, etc.)
- A link to related blog posts throughout (and at the end of) a blog post
Ultimately, there should be no page on your website where a user thinks, “I want to learn more about this business, but I don’t know how.” Users are impatient and will spend less than a few seconds looking for that next step. So it’s important to anticipate how they may want to learn more about your business based on the content they’re currently viewing.
7. Choose Colors and Fonts Carefully
Web designers spend considerable time planning a client website, considering visual harmony. Of course, we want the layout to look attractive. Still, we also try to make life as straightforward as possible for your users through typography, structure, and color choices.
Incidentally, we often see a correlation between these elements and bounce rates. The harder it is for your visitors to understand what your page says, the more likely they are to abandon it.
For colors, we always aim for a good contrast. There’s a reason that most word processors have a white background and black text — it’s simple, clean, and always easy to read. But most websites aren’t just black and white, so we have to look carefully at the colors you’re using and ensure a healthy contrast between backgrounds and font colors.
A good bit of color theory is involved in this, but we can break it down quite simply: If your site uses a darker background, we opt for lighter text. If you’ve chosen a lighter background, we opt for darker text.
Next, we help you choose a highly legible font. Again, it’s easy to gravitate toward the more unique fonts. Or, as every site seems to be transitioning to thinner, more modern fonts, it’s easy to choose a font that’s too thin. But the most important thing isn’t that your site’s font is the most fun or unique—it’s that your users can read it without squinting or zooming in.
Remember, what is easy for you to read may be difficult for others. So we use our design expertise to help you choose the right colors and fonts to express your brand while giving your visitors the best experience possible.
8. Provide Engaging Content
Providing engaging content is key to a good website UX. Nowadays, visitors want more than a purchase; they want an experience. A great way to achieve this is by adopting an engaging content strategy.
Effective content strategies focus on telling a brand’s story to establish a connection between a business and its client.
With the right strategy, content can come in any format, such as a blog post, vlog, or even a separate website. In addition, using content to establish a brand identity helps ensure potential clients know more about your business.
9. Make it Scannable
When was the last time you sat down and read a web page? Like seriously focused and read all of the details?
If we had to guess, it’s probably been a while. The average website visitor only has time to read 28% of a webpage. However, only about 20% of your content makes it through in practice.
Your audience is in a hurry, so if you want them to have a great user experience on your site, we need to ensure they can quickly find what they’re looking for.
That starts with the layout. Visitors tend to view websites in an F-shaped pattern, with more attention given to the top left corner of the page. The farther to the right and farther down the page their eyes move, the less time they spend reading.
We can design our way around this by ensuring that your most important and helpful information is always toward the top of the page and the left-hand side.
It’s also essential to make your website more skimmable by leaving plenty of white space between elements. White space allows each piece of your site to stand out more and gives your visitors’ eyes room to rest while they read.
10. Don’t Annoy Your Visitors
Until now, all our tips have been about things you should do. However, it’s equally important to discuss what you should avoid at all costs regarding web design and user experience.
Website visitors dislike pop-ups, autoplay, and information bombardment to the extent that it makes them appreciate it when a site avoids the temptation to implement these annoying features.
When designing your web presence, steer clear of clutter, walls of text, background music, and videos that play automatically. These factors certainly don’t help visitors feel at home.
Improving User Experience is Worth the Effort
The key to good UX design is making it work for users and your platform. In essence, a well-designed user experience is about leading users to the data or resources they need while removing everything that might stand in their path. While this goal seems universally understood, achieving it can be complicated.
If the user can’t find something, it doesn’t exist for them. As business owners, we should aspire to construct intuitive interfaces and interactions. By making our interfaces more discoverable, we improve the likelihood that users can experience and use our content and characteristics.
To see how user experience principles can significantly impact a business like yours, check out our web design work for similar companies. We’ve seen first-hand how putting user experience first leads to dramatically improved websites and, in turn, more successful businesses and product brands.
Therefore, you must improve the user experience on your website or online store as quickly as possible. These UX design tips will make your design click with your target audience and make it easy for you and them to interact.
Conclusion
In conclusion, implementing the 10 simple tips to improve user experience on your website can significantly enhance your chances of business success. By providing your customers and clients with a fantastic experience, you can expect lower bounce rates, higher conversion rates, and a more positive sentiment toward your brand.
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to create a seamless and enjoyable user experience for your website visitors. Contact us for more information and start reaping the benefits of a user-friendly website today.
Do You Need to Improve Your User Experience?
Of course, you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble by having our team improve your website’s user experience. Our award-winning team will happily help you with that. But first, look at our portfolio and read our case studies.
Then, if you believe we are a good fit for your web design needs, reach out to us! We offer a full range of consulting and design services for businesses and product brands.
Contact us to learn more about our mobile-first business web design services. Our team can determine what type of website will best support your business objectives and build it for you.
Any Questions?
And if you are still unsure how to improve your website’s user experience, let’s talk. We will listen to your concerns, answer your questions, and help you establish and grow the online presence your business needs!
Do you have any other website usability shortcomings you would like us to add to our list? Feel free to add your comments below so our audience can benefit. Grab our feed so you don’t miss our next post! And feel free to share our tips on improving user experience with your audience!
For more content relevant to your business or product brand – check out the range of articles on our web design blog. (This one, explaining how to build a user-friendly business website, is an excellent place to start!)
Thank you! We appreciate your help to end bad business websites, one pixel at a time!
By PixoLabo
Not Your Average WordPress Web Design Agency
@PixoLabo