Are you worried about having an outdated website design? You have reason to be concerned.
According to studies, 75% of people from their impressions of websites based on aesthetics. If you do a poor design job, you run the risk of losing customers.
If you want to increase your website engagement, working on your design is the first place to start. Follow the seven tips below to help improve your website experience when revamping your site.
1. Highlight Your Value Proposition
In many cases, people will visit your website because they have a problem to solve. Whether it’s from a search engine or another traffic source, they click on your link because they believe your site has the answer. It’s a problem when you can’t show people quickly how your website will help.
It’s critical to highlight your value proposition as quickly as possible when someone lands on your site. If someone ends up on your homepage, make sure to highlight your site services at the top of your site, where it’s easy to see.
If someone came looking for answers to one of your blog posts, don’t waste time on unnecessary filler with your content. Use your headline and introduction to tell your visitors that they should continue reading your blog content.
2. Simplify Your Navigation
The chances are that there will only be a few essential pages on your site. These will likely be your primary content categories and product pages. It’s a problem if it takes several clicks to find this information.
Keep your website navigation bar simple and highlight only your most important pages. It should only take a few clicks for your users to find the information they need.
If you need more than a few menu items, add them to the submenus for your primary menu items. To provide a better user experience on your navigation, use mega-menus to add a little style to your design.
3. Focus on Page Speed
One of the most significant website experience issues is site speed. The web is relying on more images than ever in design. Unfortunately, this is a problem for people with unreliable internet access.
To start improving your site speed, run your images through an optimization program. Running your images through a lossless compression program will reduce their file sizes while retaining their quality.
The next step is caching. If you run a dynamic website like WordPress, your site will make tons of database calls when rendering for your users. By using a caching system, you’ll serve a static page to your users that won’t change until you modify a website element on your backend system.
4. Highlight Your Call to Action
Even if you put together a great user experience, all your work will be for nothing if your users don’t take the action you want them to take. Whether it’s to sign up for an email list or buy a product, you can’t expect people to do what you want if you don’t tell them.
Your call to action is what directs people to take action. Take email, for instance. Set up a small opt-in box at the bottom of your articles to tell your users the benefits of joining your email list.
If you have a blog post talking about a common problem people have, help people understand why your products solve that problem. Once you do, create a prominent link at the end of your article to direct people to buy.
5. Improve Your Mobile Design
Along with having unreliable internet access, mobile users also have smaller screens. If you only create a website design with desktop users in mind, you’re going to isolate half your user base.
A responsive design solves this problem by changing your design based on the screen size of your users. It will add and remove elements based on how they fit on the screen.
Of course, adding features to a website is more straightforward than removing them after they’re there. That’s why a mobile-first approach is the easiest way to make sure your site looks great on all devices. Design for mobile screens first, and add desktop support later.
6. Test Well Before Launching
If you’re launching a complicated web design, the chances are that you have a few bugs in your design. It’s tough to create a bug-free experience the first time around, even if you’re a great designer.
You’ll need people to test your design before launching. Gather a small group of people who represent your target audience. Once you have your group, give them a small set of tasks to go through on your site.
Your goal is to have them accomplish these tasks as best they can without feedback. If they can’t do what you ask of them, it says that your web design isn’t working as expected.
7. Track Your Visitors
You can’t figure out all your website issues by guessing. You’ll need hard data to understand which parts of your website don’t work well. Analytics software will help you make that determination.
The biggest goal with analytics is to figure out where your users are dropping off in the conversion process. Software that tracks users with heatmaps and session replays like decibel.com will help you understand exactly where that happens.
Heatmaps and session replays will show you what areas of your site that your users move their mouse. Knowing this information tells you the parts that they focus on. If your users focus on the wrong areas, you’ll need to change your design to bring attention to the more essential parts.
It Takes Work to Improve Your Website Engagement
With so many websites out there on the internet, you can’t get away with providing a poor user experience on your website. You need to do all you can to give your users what they want, so use the tips above to improve your website engagement.
Of course, there are other things you can do to improve how well your site functions. Head back to our blog to find out how to get the most from your site.
