Your website is often the first touchpoint for possible clients where they can get to know your company. Therefore, you have to make sure the visitor does not get lost. We’d like to give you five tips & tricks to make your website 100% user friendly!
1. THINK ABOUT YOUR VISITOR, NOT ABOUT YOURSELF
While creating your website, you have to get inside the mind of your visitor. Not doing so, is often the biggest mistake companies make.
LANGUAGE
When writing down content it’s better not to use company jargon that’s too specific to your sector. Rather, think about which words your visitor would use. Same thing applies for abbreviations. You might know where SEA, SEO and CTA stands for, but that doesn’t mean your reader knows. You don’t want people to leave your website, simply because they don’t understand what you’re talking about, now do you?
WEBPAGES
Don’t make your website based on what you want to tell your customer, like random news facts for instance. Chances are high the visitor is not interested. Instead, think about what the visitor would like to know and which questions he or she might have. Once you know which topics to address, you can subdivide them into different web pages on your website.
It’s recommended to discuss just one topic per page. That is because of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Let’s clarify that for you: search engines analyze each page to assess what the page is about. They do that by crawling each page and analyzing it by what tags you’ve used.
So, to ensure Google reads your page correctly, place the most important search term in the title of your page and give it an H1 tag. Now, when someone searches for your topic, Google will know your web page is relevant and place your page at the top of the search results.
2. WHAT WORKS FOR ONE, DOES NOT MEAN IT WORKS FOR YOU
When it comes to design and placing all the different elements on your website, there are certain things that work better than others. You must have noticed the “place in basket”-button often has a striking color, mostly green, no? Why is that?
The reason for doing so is actually quite simple: a green color is associated with something good, something positive! And that has a psychological effect on the reader. The same applies for the green check marks, which sum up benefits of a certain product or service.
In addition, it’s also recommended to place your logo at the top left, because visitors are so used to it, it might even become annoying if that would not be the case. Next, it is also better not to place important information at the right side of your website, because people often overlook it.
TEST, ANALYZE AND OPTIMIZE
What works for one, might not work for your website. That’s why it’s still important to keep testing, analyzing and optimizing instead of blindly following best practices. Quick tip: it’s best to perform A/B tests and never change two things at the same time. That way you can always compare what works and what doesn’t.
However, in order to be able to check what works and what doesn’t, you need to know what’s going wrong and where the problem is located on your website. Analyze your website sufficiently to track down where visitors get lost.
Having trouble finding the problem? Create a short user survey and let your visitor indicate the issue.
3. WHY IS SOMEONE VISITING YOUR WEBSITE?
The question you have to ask yourself when drafting your website is why are people visiting your page? What are they looking for? For one, it will be to gather information or to find an answer to a question. For the other, it will be the purchase of a product or a service or finding the contact information of the company.
Take your time to analyze what the most visited components of your website are and make sure those can be easily reached via the homepage. Your homepage is comparable to a train station where the visitor should be able to find his or her desired destination as quickly as possible. The shorter the customer journey, the fewer steps a visitor has to take to get where he or she needs to be, and the more satisfied the customer.
4. KEEP BELLS AND WHISTLES FOR A PARTY, NOT FOR YOUR WEBSITE
The easier a visitor finds what he or she is looking for, the better. That’s why you need to leave all the frills aside. There’s nothing wrong with cool branding and a nice design, but make sure that it doesn’t take precedence over functionality.
By using clear CTAs, or Call To Actions, you can lead your visitor on a journey through your website. So, take some time to think about the position of these CTAs on your site. You don’t want to overtake visitors immediately on the homepage with a “buy now”-button!
The visitor needs to be warmed up first by gathering information, before he or she is ready to decide whether to purchase a product or service. Consider those different steps in the purchasing process while designing your website.
In addition, capturing data via forms needs to be as simple as possible. Only ask for the necessary data needed to allow the visitor to continue to flow through the customer journey. When you do ask for additional information, make sure you clearly address why that is requested. In doing so, the visitor does not become suspicious and won’t leave your website, but instead will be happy to give you his or her information.
Like that ;-).
5. WEBSITE LOADING TIME & RESPONSIVENESS
There is nothing more annoying than ending up on a page and having to wait before anything appears. If your website takes too long to load, the visitor will leave. Fortunately, there are some basic principles to improve the loading speed of your website:
Ensure that, at the first visit, files such as images, HTML, CSS and JavaScript elements are stored locally in the visitor’s browser. When he or she arrives on your website a second or next time, the loading time will be much shorter.
COMPRESS YOUR FILES
Compressing your files ensures that heavy files become much lighter for your website. In doing so, your page will need less time to load and display everything. Before compressing images, it’s better to already have them in a smaller size.
In addition to the loading time of your website, the responsiveness is also important. We don’t just visit websites on our desktop anymore, but also on our smartphone, laptop or tablet in all different shapes and sizes. No less than 50% of all websites are being viewed via our smartphone! Hence, ensure your website also looks good and functions perfectly on all those devices.
As the ancient proverb goes: customer is king. That is certainly no different when building websites. Nowadays, we are overloaded with information, deals and advertising, so we no longer see the wood for the trees. A user-friendly website is then thé way to create clarity among visitors and guide them through their customer journey, with hopefully a purchase at the end of the trip. 😉
