How to Improve The User Experience on Your Website
Today, your website has become such an important asset for your business. It’s a great way to create your brand story, reputation, and awareness.
A lot of businesses are investing in marketing tactics and advertisements to get users to get to their website like SEO, social media, paid Ads and email marketing.
The more people you get to your website, the higher the conversion rate is right?
Not necessarily.
People may be coming to your website, but this doesn’t mean they're converting into buyers. One key aspect that helps influence buyers is user experience.
If your visitors have a bad user experience with your website, it will result in a low conversion rate.
So how can you improve the user experience on your website? First, let's explain what it is
What is user experience?
User experience is the behaviour and emotions that customers will have when they interact with your website or product.
There are many things to consider when trying to optimize your user experience like design, usability, functions and user interaction.
These all play a crucial role in how your visitors feel about your company. The flow of your website, easy to navigate, useful resources and content, compelling headlines and many more.
Why is user experience important
User experience is important because it ties in with your brand reputation and conversion rate.
Think about it, have you ever had a bad experience with a brand? Bad customer service? Hard to use or poorly designed website? Did you pay money for the product or service or did you find a competitor?
You most likely went with the competitor. You don’t want to spend your hard-earned money on something you feel negative about.
This is the same for your customers, if they don’t like the feeling of your product or website, they won’t spend money on it.
User experience helps minimize any doubt or negativity with great flow from consideration to purchase.
Now that you understand user experience, let's get into 4 ways you can improve your website user experience.
How to improve the user experience on your website
There are many things to consider when trying to improve your user experience. What may work for one industry may not work for yours. That’s why it's crucial to do some A/B testing and test different headlines, call-to-actions, resources and even colour.
Here are 4 main ways you can improve the user experience for your website.
Site speed
Site speed plays a role in not only your user experience but in your SEO campaign as well! No one likes dealing with a slow website, it's frustrating to navigate through and increases your bounce rate (visitors instantly leaving your website).
There a few things you can do to increase your website speed like:
- Compressing images and videos – Images and videos take the longest to load as they take up more content of the website. Simply compressing and optimizing your images will reduce the load time.
- Using a speed plugin – depending on your Content management system, there may be a plugin you can use to lower your load speed. They use methods like enabling browser caching, lazy loading and minimizing code (HTML, CSS, javascript). WP Rocket is a great plugin for WordPress sites.
- Improve your hosting package – If your website gets a lot of visitors, it may be time to upgrade your web hosting package. If you're on a shared hosting plan, this can affect your site speed since it's shared with other websites. Think of it like an elevator, if it's in a shared elevator, it’ll take longer to get to your floor.
Website optimization
Your website needs to professionally represent your brand. Choosing the right colours, content and having a proper call to action to increase conversions.
Optimizing your website for user experience can help influence your visitors to purchase from you.
Things to consider when optimizing your website:
- Mobility – Make sure your website is both desktop and mobile-friendly. Google will rank mobile-friendly sites higher than non-mobile sites. Also, more than 50% of web traffic comes from mobile.
- Content Optimization – Having information that can help influence your visitors like proper headings, testimonials and benefits can improve user experience. Having an informative blog or resources to help the client understand your product is crucial.
- Proper Call to Action – your website may be getting visitors, but there may not be any call to action for users to convert. Well placed buttons and links throughout your website can improve the flow of the marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, conversion).
Understanding how users interact
Website user interactions are the actions taken on your website. This can be the page they're viewing, what buttons and links they click and factors that made them leave the website without purchasing or downloading anything.
Using analytics software like Google Analytics is a great tool to see which pages are performing the best, what pages users left on and how many conversions you’ve made. It's great for numbers but can't give you a visual representation of how users are interacting with your website.
Using a session recording software will allow you to see exactly how your users are interacting with your website.
For example, let's say your goal is to get users to sign up for a free trial. You can see why and where users are leaving the sign-up form. Maybe it's too many required fields or is asking too much. When you have a visual idea of what can help, you can implement a new strategy to get more conversions.
A session recording software can efficiently and effectively allow you to perform A/B testing that will allow you to increase your experience and conversions.
Improve your customer service
75% of customers who leave a business is because they weren’t satisfied with the customer service. Your customer service plays a key role in increasing the user experience. Many consumers won’t spend their money on brands they have a negative experience with.
But how can you implement online customer service to your website?
There a few ways you can implement or improve your customer service online.
- Respond to inquires quickly - Whenever an interested customer visits your website, they may have some questions or contact you through email. Answering questions and inquiries quickly and professionally can help influence the transaction process.
- Live chat - Having a live chat on your website is a great way to increase your online customer service experience. You can have your sales or customer support team to interact with visitors to your website. This is a great way to respond to inquires than traditional email.
- Customer Feedback - A simple customer survey can give you what exactly you need to improve the customer experience. After the interaction or transaction, a “how did we do?” survey can give you great ideas for the areas of improvement. You can learn more on What is customer feedback and 5 ways to collect them
Closing thoughts
Today, website user experience has become an important aspect of your business’ growth. Many customers will share both negative and positive experiences with friends and family through online reviews, social media posts, or even in person.
Visitors that have a great customer experience will most likely make a purchase, make recommendations and will even come back. That's why it's important to understand how they interact with your website and their experience.
This can also increase customer loyalty. If you want to learn how you can increase customer loyalty, you can read our blog about it: How to Increase your Customer Loyalty
At Moment, we offer live chat and session recording software to help increase your user experience and understand the user interaction.