Without a doubt, the user experience is one of the single most important factors that directly impact your conversions. It is difficult for your customers to buy if you provide a poor user experience to your visitors. Only when you engage with your target audience well can you convince them to buy your product or service. Moreover, if visitors come to your site and leave in just a few seconds, it adversely affects your bounce rates.
The average human attention span is gradually on the decline. And, it is most relevant for website user experience. You don’t have too much time to impress your customers, all you have is a few seconds to attract and impress your visitors. And if you don’t provide a good user experience to your customers, they can leave and move on to your competitors.
Why is website user experience important?
An excellent website user experience helps promote familiarity, and it also increases loyalty. As people engage more with your material, they come close to your brand community which makes them more familiar with your brand, and this, in turn, increases loyalty.
Good user experience is also important because it increases your visibility. The more people engage with your content, the more visible it becomes, and you get a wider audience.
As engagement increases, it makes your content more effective.
Therefore, it is imperative that you pay a lot of attention to website user experience, and improve it for your customers so that they start doing business with you.
So, what should you do to improve the website user experience?
Ways to increase the user experience of your website
A lot can be done to increase the user experience of your customers. Here are ways that you can use to increase the user experience of your website:
Ensure your website is easy to navigate – If your visitors start leaving your website because they are unable to find what they want, then it is a serious issue. Websites that are difficult to navigate can increase the bounce rates which, in turn, will lead to poor website user engagement.
Therefore, make sure that the navigation of your website is simple and easy. Your visitors don’t like to waste their time and energy just for searching a page. You need to ensure that your navigation menu is clear so that people can conveniently reach where they want to go. Your navigation bar should be accessible, and your categorization also needs to be clear. You should design your navigation in such a way that your homepage load speed doesn’t suffer.
Make sure that the load speed of your website is lightning fast – People these days don’t have too much patience. And, if your website takes too long to load, your visitors are likely to leave your website and that too for good. Slow site speed is a serious handicap, and you need to resolve it ASAP. If the load speed of your website is slow, website user engagement takes a big hit
You can do a page load speed test to find out the load speed of your website. In case your website is not loading in two seconds, you need to fix the problem. There are tools available on the internet (for free) that will allow you to find the load speed of your website. You need to remove the stuff that is not required on your pages. You should also limit the use of excess images from the posts so that your pages start loading faster. You can download plugins so that the images load later.
Therefore, if you want to improve the user experience of your visitors, ensure that your website loads faster.
Ensure that your website design is responsive – With the rise in smartphone usage, you need to make sure that your website design is responsive. Hence, if you want to improve the user experience of your visitors, you should ensure that your website design is responsive. To make your website responsive, you need to make sure that your mobile and desktop users are easily able to access your website. If your website is meant only for the desktop users, then it results in poor user experience for those who are accessing it on their mobile devices, and this is a big problem in today’s scenario.
If your website is responsive, it engages well with your users, which decreases your bounce rates and increases your viewership. In case you want to improve the user experience of your visitors, you should make sure that your website is mobile-friendly so that you don’t lose customers.
Do make sure that you add a search box at a prominent place – Many websites get this wrong. People at times visit your website with a specific query in mind. When people visit your website, and they don’t find a search box, it frustrates them a lot. It obviously creates a negative user experience if your visitors cannot find a search box. The best way is to add a search box at a prominent place so that your visitors don’t have to waste their time. You can add a search box at the top left side of your website which is where most of the websites have it. A magnifying glass at the search box is the standard practice for most of the websites which you can also adapt to make things simple and easy.
Make sure that you improve your internal linking, and see to it that you display related content – When you improve your internal linking structure, it becomes easier for your users to navigate your website. Right kind of internal linking can also improve your SEO rankings. When your SEO rankings improve, and your website is easy to navigate, it increases your page views and lowers your bounce rates which in turn improves user engagement of your website. Ensure that the links have descriptive anchor text. Also, make sure that they are relevant and specific, and that it reaches a new destination.
You should ensure that at the end of every post some relevant posts are displayed. It gives an opportunity to your users to move to a related post conveniently (in case they want more information on the topic they are reading) which helps improve the user experience of your visitors.
You need to find out what your viewers want – It is important that you try to understand what your customers are interested in and what they want. You need to find out the preferences and values of your audience. If you give your audience what they like, it is sure to improve user engagement. Conducting a survey can help you to find out what they want. With the help of the survey, you can find out the likes and dislikes of your audience, things that interest them, and the information that they need. You can use the info to generate relevant content for your website which is bound to increase user engagement and improve user engagement. This is another way of making your viewers feel important, and it is sure to increase user engagement.
You can also analyse your website data to find out which pages are being viewed more and pages that your visitors are exiting fast. You can then change your content and give your audience what they want.
Make sure that you have a plan in place to collect email addresses – Website user engagement means keeping the visitor engaged for a long time. Your job is not complete by making the visitor come to your site once. Your purpose gets served only if the visitors come to your site on a regular basis. To make this happen, you need to collect as many email addresses as you can so that you can forward them the relevant content time and again.
Using pop-up opt-ins is one way to collect the email addresses of your customers. Another way of collecting email addresses of your customer’s addresses is to use a subscription form on your website’s sidebar. Another way of getting the email addresses is to place an opt-in box at the bottom of the page which your customers can fill after they are through with the content.
You can also let your customers read the first paragraph of your content, and then blur rest of the content and ask them to provide their email addresses first before proceeding further.
If you want to improve your website user experience, you should get in touch with vStacks Software Solutions. For a prosperous online journey, you can get in touch with us, and we will take care of all your digital needs.
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