The roles of user experience in any user journey or transaction cannot be over emphasized. Your audience will easily leave your website if you fail to provide them with superior and require experience they want on your site. The worst of all is that users will definitely leave your site without making any transaction or engagement and may not even come back again. This can result to low performance of your website in terms of conversion, engagement, popularity and lots more. I am sure that no one ever wants his or her efforts in driving traffic and promoting website to be a waste of time. There is no doubt about the fact that you will not be able to impress your visitors if do not have good UX, UI or CTA available on your website. Therefore, am going to highlight 8 tips on some basics for improving user experience on a website on this article.
Ensure Your Website Is Visually Good and Appealing
There is no doubt about the fact that the nature of your website has lots of things to do about engagement of visitors. With high level of competition among various websites and brands on the internet, visitors are not ready to notice a site that is poorly designed. The design of your website is what first-time visitors will notice before deciding to check in or not. So, you should expect low engagement of users if your website looks awful or not appealing. This is one of the basics you need when you want to improve user experience on your site. Some areas to give a professional touch on your site in order to make it look appealing are:
• The interface
• Layout of your web page
• Readability of your contents
• Compatibility of contents on your page.
Make Sure Your Navigation of Your Site Is Clear
The map to audience on your website is simply the navigation. For that reason, there is need for your site navigation to be well structured and clear. Your audience will not have enough patient analyzing navigation of your site in order to know the hierarchy of your site. That is why you have made everything clear and visible to all audience. There is high tendency that your audience will probably bounce back from your site when they are not able to find a picture of your site hierarchy.
Make Use of Breadcrumbs on Your Site
If you have a site with complex hierarchy structure like e-Commerce and others, you need to implement breadcrumbs. It is important for all large websites and helps search engines to fully and completely understand the hierarchy structure of your website. It also increase usability of the users on your website with no iota of difficulty involves. This concept is beneficial both for users and SEO and does so many other things including:
• It makes it easy for users to track location on web page
• It is designed with only one click away
• It encourages users to visit more pages on your site
• It helps to reduce bounce-rate of a website.
• And others.
Just Make Your Site Sociable
It is really mandatory nowadays to add sharing buttons for social media on a website. This is due to increase in demand of social media to individuals which made making a word popular super easy. Despite the fact that social media such as, tweets, likes and followers are not considered as ranking factor by Google they can really impact your audience. This is mostly when they notice enormous number of likes, followers and tweets or any other engagement on social media. In fact, your audience will help to share your link on their account increasing your popularity online.
Provide Your Audience with an HTML Sitemap on 404 Pages
Preparing for unexpected situation is another thing you need to bear in mind while optimizing users experience on your site. The truth is that you will not have all the time to repair or fix dead pages. Rather what you have to do is to find a way to resolve the issue and still engage your audience in real time. Sites like Henrikhedegaard.com or Lego are doing this. I just noticed they sites that are doing this have one thing in common and that is to inform audience either to visit homepage or previous page. There are reasons why there should be list of pages to select from when there is a problem or dead site. The reasons include: The visitors may be coming from link from external website, social post or other referral source and the expectation of the visitors will not really be met and redirecting them back to homepage will not really be of help. Therefore for the sake of user experience I will recommend offering audience with an HTML on 404 pages.
Make Provision for Conversions Forms on Your Site
Indeed, since you may like to get some important information from audience like their email address, phone number and others it is important for you to provide conversion forms on your website. There are some important tips you need to know when it comes to optimizing your conversion forms. Some of the tips include:
Make sure you only add essential information you may likely need
Avoid separation of first and last names as that will result to extra space
Ensure position your form on the most prominent part of your web page
Ensure you include privacy policy of your site.
Make Sure Your Website Has Multi-Device Compatibility
There is rapid increase in the number of mobile search online today. For that reason, it is expected that internet users accessing the internet with mobile devices are more than the ones making use of PC or desktop computer. For that reason, one of the basics for increasing user experience is simply to make your website compatible with multiple devices. In fact, it is expected that Google will want webmasters to have their website accessible on mobile devices.