5 Powerful Ways to Improve Website UX Fast
Aren’t you fed up with high bounce rates and low engagement on your site? If so, perhaps it’s time you check your website UX.
There several SEO practices to increase a site’s visibility on the web, including link building, excellent content, and email marketing; however, these strategies will remain ineffective if your website’s UX is mediocre.
Site UX is all about how visitors experience your site. Do they seamlessly find the information they were looking for on your website? Do they leave your site frustrated because it doesn’t offer them the experience they expected?
Undoubtedly, you want Google to find your site useful. But you can’t achieve this aim by solely putting up great content for your visitors. By accompanying your SEO strategies with great UX, you can significantly reduce your bounce rate and have more users complete the intended actions on your site.
That being said, keep in mind the following best practices of website UX.
1. Ease Navigation
To offer users the best experience, ensure that your navigation is straightforward. The aim is to minimize the energy your visitors spend to reach particular pages.
The further a user has to scour your site to get what they are looking for, the quicker they give up. So, ensure that your most important pages are at most three clicks away.
Moreover, provide some sort of map to simplify navigation so that your visitors can quickly get back to the home page or previous pages. You can achieve this by showing breadcrumbs or having your menu present above all pages throughout.
A breadcrumb is a small clickable text path, usually found at the top of a page as illustrated on the image below.
2. Communicate with Your Visitors’ Words
One of the top priorities of getting the user experience right is communicating in the language of the users. No doubt, you are an expert in your industry; however, your site visitors could be using different terms when looking for your products or services.
Here, the top tip is to avoid being overly technical. For instance, instead of saying, “Do you want more conversions?” say, “Do you want more paying customers?”.
3. Improve Your Buttons
Indeed, simplistic design works best for interactive elements, such as clickable buttons. However, the science of actionable buttons does not stop at the design. Give your readers an idea of what they are about to do using simple, action-provoking text.
Nonetheless, inserting some text inside a block is not enough to define a button. By adding rounded corners and increasing the depth, you make your buttons more distinguishable and clickable.
There are better ways to craft call-to-action buttons other than using the phrase “Click here to…” By focusing on the action you want the visitor to take when creating CTAs, you make things easier for the user, improving your conversions. Thus said, use words like “Activate,” “Download,” “Buy this product,” etc.
The image below from Crazy Egg shows an actionable CTA.
4. Get Creative with Links
For years, people have known blue, underlined texts as links. It’s now easier to eliminate underlining. Whereas this may seem cleaner, it may be difficult for users to identify the blue texts as links.
Changing the color might pose a new challenge, especially to colorblind users. However, this does not leave underlining as the only solution. Play with the font type, size, and capitalization to define your links.
5. Maintain Consistency in all Platforms
It’s incredibly important to offer a consistent experience across all access platforms, whether desktop, smartphone, and tablet. You want to ensure your visitors can access all the basics of your site, regardless of the access medium they use.
Keep in mind that an incredible percentage of site traffic comes from mobile users. If a user is not satisfied with the mobile experience, don’t expect them to follow up with a desktop.
There is an urgent need for website owners to work on their sites’ mobile-friendliness. If you’re building a website, it’s wise to start with a mobile version and then scale it up to desktop version.
Bottom Line
The best result not only comprises the best information but also takes care of the user experience. It’s for this reason improving your site’s UX should be one of the top priorities in your SEO strategy. Having lured potential customers into your site with various SEO techniques, offer them inexplicable experience with the above tricks.