Have you ever looked at your website from the eyes of a customer or client?
Would your customer be able to easily find shipping costs?
Are your prices and packages easy to find?
Does your homepage tell your site visitor exactly what you do in the first few lines?
All these things fall into the little category of user experience – or UX in design terms.
UX plays a big part in conversions and also SEO because high bounce rates in Google’s eyes means your content ain’t keeping people around!
Here’s a few quick wins to improve your user experience and keep people on your site a little longer.
1. Intro Paragraph
I mentioned this in my blog Top 6 DIY Website Mistakes but it’s worth mentioning here because it’s a pretty important piece of info. If you don’t have a short, sweet introductory paragraph near the top of your homepage telling people the who, what, why then how will they know if you can help them?
An introductory paragraph or an elevator pitch as it’s also known, will explain what you do, who you do it for and why or how you do it.
2. Easy to navigate menu
Having an easy to use menu will help users find what they need on your site quickly. Try to keep them as limited as possible or use sub menu’s to give your pages a hierarchy. Be careful to include too many pages though – remember on mobile the menu can look awfully long!
3. Fast website
Having a website that is super slow to load will have users exiting faster than you can say “wait”. A slow loading website is also bad for SEO as Google won’t rank your site as well as faster loading sites due to the effect is has on UX. Speed up and Clean up services should be done at a minimum once per year to make sure everything is running as it should and optimised for web.
4. Is your key information easy to find / see
Key information should be front and centre so potential customers can find or see it quickly. This is especially important for shipping costs. Most abandon carts are due to surprise shipping charges at the checkout. You might get away with it if your shipping is $5, but not if the unexpected amount of $17.95 pops up! A good place to pop shipping rates is in the topbar of your site.
5. Is your website easy to look at?
Some websites can be really fun, but they’re not easy to use or look at. Bright colours are great to use, but having them as backgrounds under text or headings can make the text hard to read – especially for us night owls. Make sure your website is easy to read at all hours of the day and keep your font clean and clear.
A good way to test your site is have friends and family use it and tell you what they think or post in a business group and ask for feedback.
Can you think of things that make you back out of a website quickly? Is there something on your site that you think might be turning people off?
Feel free to Contact Me for a website audit or redesign if you feel your site is lacking.
