What is UX?
UX, or user experience, refers to how users experience and interact with a product, system, or service—in this case, your website. This usually includes someone’s perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency while on your site. Today we’ll discuss why UX is important and some small steps you can take to significantly improve how users experience your business’s website.
Why Does UX Matter?
Providing a seamless and pleasant user experience on your website is crucial to initially get customers to stay on your website for longer and, many times, return more than once. At the end of the day, you want to drive conversions on your site. Whether it’s a purchase, a form submission, button clicks, or an app installation, a solid UX strategy can help you drive these conversions.
Steps to Drastically Improve Your Website’s UX
There are hundreds of different steps you can take to improve your website’s UX. Below are just a few steps you can take that will make a significant difference!
1. Regular page speed optimization
As we all know, websites aren’t a set it and forget it endeavor. Websites need regular maintenance in order to ensure they’re running smoothly and not causing users issues when navigating. One standard periodic maintenance task is page speed optimization. After all, website conversion rates tend to drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5). Page speed optimization then becomes crucial when doing regular site maintenance.
2. Keep it short and sweet
With the exception of blog posts, website pages that are too wordy will usually prompt users to click off rather quickly. Most times, it’s the best idea to keep your messages short and straight to the point. Times are changing and our attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter. It’s important to adapt to these changes! Coming up with a strategy that involves using SEO boosting keywords often but eloquently without making your page text-heavy will help improve your SEO as well as keep users engaged and not overwhelmed with information.
3. Use images and videos
We all know that images and video will keep people engaged for longer than pieces of text will. It’s also important to note that 90 percent of all information that we perceive and that gets transmitted to our brains is visual. An added bonus of incorporating videos and images in your website strategically is that it can and will help your SEO.
4. Be responsive and mobile-friendly
There’s nothing worse than visiting a website on your phone and realizing the developer didn’t adapt it to be mobile-friendly. Ugh!
When up to 70 percent of web traffic comes from mobile devices, you can’t afford to not build your business’s website to be mobile-friendly. Thankfully, most website builders such as WPBakery and Elementor on WordPress have settings that allow you to preview how your website would look on other devices and tweak it accordingly before you publish it.
5. Stay consistent
Consistency across your site in terms of branding, wording, tone, layout, flow, etc. will make for an overall smoother experience for users navigating your site from page to page.
All In All…
We hope that by now we’ve properly expressed how important it is that your website’s UX is pleasant and smooth for all users. This will not only help drive conversions and boost SEO, but it will prompt users to come back to your site and maybe even tell their friends and family about your business! At the end of the day, improving UX can be a strong pillar of your business’s inbound marketing strategy.
If you’re looking to build a new website for your business, or you need a team to consult about the UX on your existing website, WheelHouse IT has a full web and marketing department at your service! Click here to learn more or give us a call at (877) 771-2384 ext. 2.
