5 Small Businesses Tips for Enhancing Website User Experience

The internet has rapidly turned the world into a 24/7 online economy. The very reason you need an online presence. Thankfully, your business’s website is here to serve your customers all around the clock. However, it can be frustrating finding out that people are visiting your website, but are bouncing back without fulfilling what they wanted or doing what you want them to do.

Before you start looking for what or to blame employee engagement, it is clear that they didn’t have a delightful experience on your website. It could be that they had a hard time navigating, didn’t make an emotional connection with the website or the content didn’t add value to them among other things.

Your solution here is to find ways to improve the user experience of your website. It can be daunting to overhaul the entire setup, but a few improvements here and there can go a long way.

Here, we look at 5 tips that you can use to enhance the website user experience for your small business.

However, before you start thinking of improving website user experience, it is important to ensure that your prospects are finding you easily on the search engines in the first place. If they can’t find you, the chances of them ever getting to your website are minimized significantly. Employ ways to optimize your site for SEO. For instance, if you are a gym owner, a good SEO for gyms strategy starts with determining the most searched keywords by gym enthusiasts. You can then create valuable content using these keywords to raise your ranking on the online search engines. In addition, you can use a Google My Business page, usually featured in the ‘Map’ section. This one is much easier to get it highly ranked than a website. Be sure to include your name, address, and contacts correctly. Solicit for reviews to drive the fastest rankings to boost.

Now, to the tips for enhancing the website user experience

1. Make text easily readable

People read content differently, but the truth is, most people scan through the content. They only go back to read the whole thing if it sounds interesting. In this case, you want to make your text easier to scan for people who visit your website.

Start by using a good font that is easy to read. Next, use plenty of headings to help break the text into small readable chunks. Anyone scanning through gets a lot of information when you use many headings as compared to using a few headlines followed by a huge block of text. Remember to make your paragraphs short, use bulleted or numbered lists, and highlight the important terms. If you want people to click on a text, make it obvious by underlining and using a different color.

2. Make it easy to navigate

No one wants to stay in a place that he or she feels lost.”If your visitors can’t find your navigation area then they’ll be lost. Lost users lead to bored and confused users who leave your site” - say experts from Once Interactive.

That is why your website design should include easy navigation that lets people know where they are and how to get to the next place they are going. When it comes to website design, it is good to let it follow what most people are used to. For instance, the first place to look for a logo is the top-left corner for most people. They also know that clicking it will lead to the homepage, so let it be so. Other things would be the main navigation menu that includes the Home, Contact, Products, About Us, log in and other important icons placed at the top. They also expect the footer to include the Sign-up form, social media links, Privacy Policy, and other less clicked icons.

3. Optimize for speed

One thing that is sure to put off users from a website is website pages that take too long to load. People nowadays are more conscious of their time, and when a quick search on your website turns to minutes, you can be sure that they will bounce at a very high rate, which would be detrimental for your website traffic. Even as you concentrate on making the content readable and design easy to use, you need to improve on the website performance.

A few things you can do to improve the speed includes minifying scripts and style sheets and getting rid of unnecessary features. You can also minimize the size of your images, but be careful not to compromise the quality.

4. Let it look appealing

Most people love looking at aesthetically pleasing things, and your website is not an exception. If it is crumpled and cluttered, people will find it not appealing to the eye.

You can start by making use of white space. This means leaving ample empty spaces between text to increase legibility and to make your website look organized and fresh. In addition to using organized text, you need to make sure you find a balance between images, animations, and colors. Lastly, minimize the number of popups. These are a joy killer when one is happily navigating through a website.

5. Optimize for mobile

Technology has advanced to include different screens that people use to browse the web. Most people are turning to mobile devices such as smartphones to access the internet on the go. This is also because smartphones are cheaper and many people can access them. If you are to improve the user experience of these people, it is imperative that your website is optimized for mobile. In addition, it should have great design and easier navigation.

Conclusion

There you have it! 5 basic tips to help you improve your website user experience. However, you shouldn’t stop there. It is good to keep testing your website with different variations to see what works best for you.