Rewind a few short years and a glossy, stylish website was enough to pull customers in. Nowadays, though, it’s not hard to create a great-looking website. With so many pre-made themes and intuitive content management systems to choose from, it’s easier than ever to put together a site that impresses at first glance. As a result, good design is expected – users take it for granted.
What truly sets a website apart today is how it performs. Does it provide all the information a user is looking for? How simple is it to navigate from page to page? How quickly does it load? User-friendliness is every bit as important as design, and in this blog, we’re going to offer five tips to help you improve this aspect of your website.
To kick things off, we’d recommend carrying out a CRO audit. What’s one of those, you’re probably thinking? Well, CRO stands for conversion rate optimisation. In short, CRO is all about analysing the experience a customer has when they use your website and picking up on any issues that could prevent them from converting (i.e. buying your products, getting in touch with you or subscribing to your service).
The aim of every commercial website is to generate conversions, be it email newsletter signups, sales or any other action that turns a user into a customer. By carrying out a CRO audit, you’ll be able to identify areas for improvement and determine where your site’s user experience falls down. Once you know what needs to be improved, you can then go away and make tweaks to the site and analyse the impact these tweaks have on your conversion rate. If you’ve made the right changes, your conversion rate should climb, demonstrating that your site is more user-friendly than it was before.
Your site’s content serves more than one purpose. It’s not just there to help you rank well on the SERPs, it can be used to guide the user and provide helpful information to point them in the right direction. If your content has just been written solely with SEO in mind, revisit it and see how you can make it more user-friendly.
This could mean adding subheadings and bullet points to your blogs or help articles, adding further detail to your product descriptions or improving your call-to-actions. When you’re writing, think about who you’re writing for. If you were a potential customer, what content would you like to read?
An otherwise fantastic website can easily be ruined by an unintuitive menu system. If users can’t work out where to go next to get the answers they’re looking for, they’ll probably leave your site altogether and shop somewhere else. If you’re noticing that your site’s bounce rate is high, it might be because your menu system is unclear.
To make things better, consider simplifying the menu or recategorising and renaming certain pages. No matter which page a user lands on, it should be clear where they’re expected to go next.
Site speed is a big deal. It’s been a ranking factor on most search engines for a while now, and for good reason. If your site doesn’t load quickly, users will get bored and leave – it’s that simple!
The average shopper’s attention span is shorter than it’s ever been, and websites should be built with this in mind. If your site is slower to load than your competitor’s sites, this could be one of the reasons why you’re struggling to attract and retain customers. Improve it and you should see both rankings and conversion rates increase.
There’s no substitute for testing. If you want to make your website easier to use, you need to use it yourself. Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer, following the path from researching their purchase to completing an order. Then, do the same for your competitors’ websites (or sites in a totally different sector that you enjoy using). Ask yourself: how do those other websites compare to yours?
As a customer experience and web design agency with more than two decades of expertise, we’ve transformed websites for businesses in a whole host of different industries. From rebranding and bespoke site builds to CRO audits and content writing, we do it all. To learn more and discuss your requirements with us, get in touch today.
Please select all of the services that are relevant.
Our website projects start at a minimum of £35k and typically range all the way to £150k depending on scope and functionality. Now we’ve been upfront with how much a project can cost hopefully you can be with your budget…