User experience on websites is becoming more and more important. Since the pandemic began in 2020 more and more businesses have moved online, meaning that there is a lot of competition out there for online businesses. So a poor website user experience just isn’t going to cut it. Read on if you want to know how to improve the user experience on your website so that your clients come back time and again.
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
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This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through these links I will get a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products that I use and love or products that I want to try.
Why is user experience important?
Competition
As I mentioned in the intro, user experience on websites is becoming more and more important because of the level of competition out there. Gone are the days where clients or customers would come to you because your competitors weren’t online yet.
So if your website gives your visitors a poor experience, they’ll go looking for a competitor that makes life easier for them.
Search engine optimisation
User experience is also becoming a major factor in search engine optimisation. No-one outside of Google knows exactly how it’s ranking algorithm works, but we do know that there’s a big focus on user experience.
And it makes sense when you think about it. The goal of a search engine is to be the most popular search engine around so you can make money from ads and all that jazz. And to be the best, you need to make sure that you’re serving up the highest quality results to your users.
If your users are clicking through to results and leaving almost instantly because the site takes ages to load, or they can’t see the content because the colour contrast is poor they’re going to find a search engine that gives them results that give them what they need.
If you’d like to find out more about SEO check out my other SEO blog posts or my SEO Simplified Workshop:
The Complete Guide to SEO for Beginners
The 5 best WordPress plugins for SEO
4 easy ways to improve website loading time
How to improve user experience on your website?
There are a few different areas to look at when it comes to improving the user experience on your website.
Clarity
The first stop on how to improve user experience on your website is clarity.
Make it very clear who your are, what you do and who you do it for. When a visitor lands on your page you have roughly 3 seconds to persuade them that you might be someone who can help them. If you make it clear what you do and who you do it for straight away, you’re going to make that decision much easier for them.
It’s OK not to be for everyone. You will have some people visit your site and realise you’re not for them. Not everyone can or will want to work with you. The goal here is make it clear to the dream clients who land on your site that you are for them.
For example, I recently audited the homepage of a counsellor’s website. Her site was set up pretty well. Clear navigation, calls to action and a picture of the owner right at the top of the home page. BUT all I could tell was that she was a counsellor, I couldn’t tell what her area of expertise was from her homepage. Did she work with adults or children? Did she have specific issues that she helped her client deal with? I didn’t know.
So get really clear on the people you help and how you do it, and then spell it out on your website.
Website loading time
We’re a generation that doesn’t like to wait. We’re used to getting what we want almost instantly especially when it comes to the web. So we can’t leave out loading times when we talk about user experience on websites.
So make sure that your pages load within the three or four seconds. Anything over four seconds should be a priority to fix.
Website speed is a whole other topic but the kind of things that you should look for if your WordPress website takes a long time to load are:
- the number of plugins that you’ve got installed. Be ruthless in shaving them down to only the essentials
- resize and compress your images before you upload them to your website
Those tend to be the main things slowing WordPress websites down along with poor hosting.
If your website is hosted with GoDaddy I very much recommend that you look for some better quality hosting. Somewhere like Siteground or my favourite is Lyrical Host they’re a female owned business based in Nottingham. They are my two choices because they’re great platforms for hosting.
Security
The next stop to look at how to improve user experience on your website is a really important one, security.
SSL Certificate
Internet users are much more security conscious these days. Especially now that modern browsers warn visitors if a website doesn’t have a security (SSL) certificate before they even get to the website.
An SSL certificate is what puts the little padlock in the address bar on a browser and adds the s to the https of a website URL.
It makes sure that visitors to your site have an encrypted connection so that any personal info submitted to the site can’t be intercepted.
Keep your website up to date
If your website is run using WordPress make sure you keep your themes and plugins up to date. When theme and plugin developers release new updates it’s usually for one or more of three reasons. Security improvement, performance improvement or new features. All three reasons will likely be good for your user experience.
If you don’t keep your site up to date it could be vulnerable to being hacked, so it’s in your best interest to keep it as up to date as possible.
If this is something that you’d like to look at outsourcing to an expert, I do offer website update services. Drop me an email for more information at kim@kimscotland.com
Duty of care
As a website owner, I think that you have a duty to make sure that your site is kept as secure as possible for your users. Even if you don’t take payments on your site your users will feel uneasy about browsing a site with no security certificate, and they definitely won’t buy anything directly from it without one.
Stick to web design conventions
I realise that if you’re reading this you’re likely not a web designer, but there are a lot of web design norms that you will be unconsciously aware of.
Navigation
Navigation is huge when looking at how to improve user experience on your website. If visitors can’t find their way around then it’s pretty much unusable.
As internet users we expect to find the menu either at the top of the screen or on the left side of the screen. Sometimes we have to click that icon with the three stacked horizontal bars (hamburger icon), but we know that’s what that icon is for.
These are web design conventions for menus. If you try to shift away too far from this you might find that your visitors get confused and frustrated and leave before they work out how to go to a different page. By all means be creative with your design, just not with your menu placement.
While I’m talking about navigation, include links to other pages on your site where it’s relevant. You’ll see that in this post I’ve linked to several other blog posts where you can go deeper on the topic I’ve mentioned. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, linking to other pages is good for my SEO. Secondly it makes it easier for you, my reader, to learn more about what I’ve mentioned. You don’t have to do any more Googling, because I’ve already given you direct links to some extra resources.
Make it easy to contact you
This seems really obvious but you’d be amazed at the number of people who don’t do it. People expect when they see an email address to be able to click it or touch it and for their email client to appear. That is another convention.
Why would you want to make someone have to click, select, copy, paste, then go into their email client to then send you an email? It doesn’t make sense.
The more barriers you put in front of people to get in touch with you the less likely they are to do it. Use that alongside forms because you’ll have some people who just want to send you an email and you’ll have some people who like the structure of a form. If you have a call scheduler, make that available too.
If you think that your ideal clients are more comfortable using messenger bots or if you think they would like to send you a voice note on WhatsApp, give them options. You lose nothing apart from the 20 seconds it takes you to add them to your website.
But you’ve got the options there. We want people to get into contact with us. If they’ve got questions and they feel confident enough to reach out it’s a green light that they’re interested in what you offer.
Just make sure that you’re only including options that you’re comfortable with. I don’t have a work phone number so I don’t have an option for phone calls or WhatsApp.
Make sure everything works
Make sure all your buttons and links work as well as any forms and call schedulers you have on your site. To provide a good user experience on websites they’ve got to work.
I had a client who recently wanted me to manage a switch from her old host to a new host. Once the site had been switched I tested it to make sure that it worked.
I found a load of links and buttons that didn’t work. Which was odd as that’s not something I would expect to break during a hosting switch. I dug a little bit deeper and it turns out that these these buttons and links had never worked.
They’d never been set up. This is pretty basic stuff but will easily irritate a user. If I’m on a home page and I want to click through to to see someone’s services and the button doesn’t work, my first thought is how much attention to detail does this company give to the products and the services they offer?
Links are more relevant to blogs. Often on a blog you would link to another website. But you can’t control whether or not the website changes it’s links or even removes the content completely.
There are tools you can use to scan your site for broken links and then you can just remove them or replace them. Check out this blog post on checking for broken links.
Calls to action
Calls to action are often overlooked when talking about user experience on websites. I think this is because they’re lumped in more with website conversion that user experience.
There’s nothing more frustrating, as a website visitor, as when you’ve decided you want to buy a product or a service while browsing a website but it’s not obvious how.
Once someone has got to the point where they’ve decided that they want to work with you make it as easy as possible for them to do it. You don’t want them to head to a competitor’s website because they couldn’t work out how to buy from yours.
Include calls to action above the fold on each page, this is the part of the page instantly visible when it first loads. I would also include at least another one at the bottom of the page. There’s no hard and fast rule for the number of calls to action to include. It depends on the length of the page. I would say to add them where it makes sense, for example after a great testimonial or a list of features.
Make your calls to action very obvious. Use buttons instead of links and make the colour a contrasting colour from the background colour. Add some kind of hover effect so that users know that if they click it it will do something.
Use active language – for example ‘Book my call’ vs ‘Book now’.
Social media icons
This one isn’t directly related to user experience on websites, it’s more of a how to keep them there to enjoy it, kind of tip.
My pet peeve on a website is social media follow buttons added anywhere but the footer. We work really hard to get visitors onto our websites. So it doesn’t make sense to give them a swift exit by linking to your social media profiles. How many times do you open your social media apps for a reason and forget why you were there in the first place?
Keeping them on your site for as long as possible has SEO benefits. It also allows them to get to know you and your services more in depth while they’re here.
Accessibility
I’m no expert in website accessibility, it’s something I’m spending a lot of time learning about at the moment. I think that a great way to improve user experience on websites is to make them accessible to as many people as possible.
Here are a few points from what I have learned so far.
- Colour contrast – make sure that you use colours with enough contrast to be easily readable by visitors. For example a light yellow background with white font won’t be easy for anyone to read whether they are visually impaired or not.
- Emojis – screen readers will read the description of any emojis they comes across, having that mid-sentence can be annoying. So use them at the beginning or end of sentences and don’t use them in clusters.
- Alt descriptions – add alt descriptions to your images, so that people using screen readers know what’s in the image.
- Don’t use images for text – this isn’t great for screen readers especially if you’ve not added an alt description. It’s also not great for SEO.
- Fonts – keep script fonts to a minimum. Make sure your body text is a minimum of 16px big.
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How to improve user experience on your website? Summary
- A good user experience on websites is important so that your visitors don’t leave to use a competitors website. It also helps with search engine optimisation.
- There are several areas to think about when looking to improve the user experience on your website including
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