User experience is a way of enabling a seamless experience for the people visiting your website or using your service or product. When it comes to online marketing and if you are a business relying heavily on your website to get leads and sales, then making sure that your website is easy to use is of the utmost importance.
Having a good WordPress website is definitely the first step if you want to increase your business’s online presence. But having a bad user experience can turn your users off and refrain them from visiting your website in the future. Just like how a good customer experience leads to future conversions, better customer retention and more users, the UX of your website dictates the conversion of your online interest to online sales.
It is not always possible to have a unique product in the market. The product or service that you provide might be provided by several other brands or suppliers as well. So you really need to make sure that your website design, UX, and the other technical aspects of your website stand out which will make your brand or service stand out amongst your competitors.
A good user experience design can help improve conversions, lower bounce rates of your website (the percentage of people who visit just one page and then immediately leave), increased leads, and better sales.
How to Improve the UX of your website?
- Better navigation
If a user is able to navigate to different pages of your website without any problem or confusion, then you can consider that your website has a good navigation feature. Grouping a long list of menus into sub-menus, making sure that your navigation URL is easy to read are a few tips to consider. Also, making sure that all the important pages can be reached or accessed easily by the primary navigation menu is also important. You don’t want to have important information on any page that is not indexed or difficult to reach via the website navigation. There are cases where a website has a page for: e.g. www.domain.com/abc but the user or the bot has no way to reach this page because it is not linked anywhere or it is not mentioned in the menu section. There has to be a clear path from one web page to another web page. This is not just for a better user experience but also it will help search engine bots to understand how each web page is connected to one another.
- Good website structure
From an optimisation point of view, having a good website structure helps the search engines to understand how the web pages are categorised and placed within the root folder. Decent website architecture also helps the user to use your website without any hassle. Imagine a user visiting your website and then they have no idea where to go next to find what they are looking for! These types of situations have to be avoided at all costs as you will lose that inquiry. It is up to us to help the users get what they want from our website by considered, good design.
- CTA
CTA (Call-To-Action) are often forgotten about while designing a website. Having a CTA button on every page will urge users to complete a purchase or signup by form. Try to choose colours that will stand out from your website plus have a uniform colour, design, and font for all the CTAs on your website. The button images get registered on the user’s mind very quickly and they will certainly find it a lot easier to complete a purchase or order. Having a “don’t care about the customers” attitude and letting them figure out things on their own is not going to work well for any online business. So having a CTA is really important.
- Searching for information easily
Search bars are an important feature to let users of your site search for a particular topic or keyword in case they can’t find what they are looking for. Tracking what the users type in can help you to include that information if it is relevant to your business/brand. In any case, if you find that a lot of users are searching for the same term from the search bar, then it is time to include that on your homepage or as a part of the menu bar. You could even include them as articles, tutorials, or part of FAQs.
- Above the fold
Adding important content above the fold helps to grab the attention of users steering them to important items or actions that you would want them to take.
- Better landing pages
Landing pages are basically web pages that are created to display in-detail information about any topic/service/product that you offer. Not just for SEO or optimisation purposes, having dedicated landing pages will help the user to understand and know more about a particular product/service rather than having a single page listing all the details of the different products and services.
Landing pages are important when you invest in paid marketing as well. For example, if you are a fashion brand and you want to promote your latest dress collection, creating a separate landing page exclusively for the latest dresses would be ideal. You could even create different versions of your landing page and do A/B testing to finalise which copy you should go for.
All this might seem like too much information though only a very small aspect of UX is discussed here. It is always better to hire a professional web design and SEO agency that is not just aware of the importance of user experience but also can help your website or brand gain a better online presence and outrank your competitors. At By George Digital, we realise that every company website is distinct and we never adopt a blanket approach when it comes to the client experience. Contact us to learn more or if you’re looking forward to having a website that can take your product to the next level.
