How to Improve Your Website User Experience

In simple words, a website user experience is what a user feels while using a website. It is the set of different behaviours users shows after interacting with different elements of our website. 

In this blog, we are going to share tips that will help you to improve the user experience. 

Almost 40% of users bounce if they didn't find an attractive design or unclear information. In the online world, a website is like a shop in real life. If the storefront is attractive and the products in the store are organized then, people will easily find their desired product and will buy eventually. 

"In marketing, the main goal is not only to bring visitors to the website. The goal is to convert visitors into leads by giving them a pleasant experience" 

"Ignoring this important point means the user will have a bad experience"

Good User experience means:

• User visited your website 
• They easily understand your website
• They navigate to different pages 
• Finally, they get what they want

Most businesses don’t focus on the user experience. However, it is the most necessary part of marketing. Let's suppose you bring users to your website by marketing and they didn't buy anything due to the bad user experience of your store elements. This means the efforts for the marketing didn't help.

In this post, we have discussed some most important elements that can enhance user experience.

Key Points:

1. Improve Website Speed
2. Avoid Page Not Found Errors (404’s)
3. Keep Your Web Pages Consistent
4. Clear and Concise Navigation
5. Use White Space
6. USE Attractive Headings
7. Catchy Call to Action
8. Use original images
9. Use Bullet Points
10. Make sure your site is responsive on all devices
11. Use hyperlink differentiation
12. Ask for minimal information

1. Improve Website Speed:

When a user comes to your website the first process that executes is the loading of the web page and no one wants to stay on the slow web pages. Almost 40% of users leave the website if your website's loading time is more than 3-5 seconds. 

Moreover, there are plenty of mobile devices in the market and everyone can access the content from anywhere. Users want a frictionless experience on a web page. Pages that load in 1 to 2 seconds get more conversions and as well it helps to improve the website ranking.

Google also launched an algorithm in 2021  "Core Web Vitals" that specially focused on website speed. Therefore, it's very compulsory working on website speed.

What can we do to improve website page speed?

There are multiple tools through which you can test your website speed and the best ones are Google Speed Insight and GTmetrix. You can test your website page speed through these tools. They will give you complete technical reports, analyze the causes due to which the website is slow and you can solve them.

Have a look at the TechStrive page speed insights result. It works really fast, no matter on which device we open its pages.

As web design experts in Berlin, our team helps a lot of brands to improve their page speed issues. You can also take our help.

2. Avoid Page Not Found Errors (404’s)

If a user does not find content on your site, it’s really annoying for them. 404 is the status code of web servers that shows the page is broken and it impacts badly on the user experience and users instantly bounce back from the page that is not found or broken. 

There are multiple ways to resolve the broken page issues:

Redirect broken pages:

Find the broken pages of your website and redirect them to the relevant page. In this way when a user will open a broken link he will automatically move to the redirect page that is working 

Custom 404 page:

‍Make a custom 404 page on your website. If by mistake you didn't redirect a broken page, then this page shows (other page links from your website) to the user and the user can navigate to other pages of the website through this custom 404 page. 

Here is the perfect example of a custom 404 page when any user types the wrong URL or clicks on the broken link, it will lead to a custom 404 page through which he can navigate to other pages of the website instead of leaving the website with a bad experience.

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3. Keep Your Web Pages Consistent:

If you want to get recognition and make yourself a brand, then all the pages of your website should be consistent. They should have the same layout, same coloring schemes, font style and font size etc.

If the style randomly changes from page to page, then it confuses the user and cannot provide an end-user experience. There are a lot of elements that make a website consistent like image size, template style etc. 

We have an experienced web design team in Berlin. You can consult us to improve your website design for a better user experience.

Have a look at the TechStrive Services pages, all of the pages are following the same layout, same font style and size.

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4. Clear and Concise Navigation:

Navigation is the path to discovering all the core pages of your website and clear navigation helps the user to explore your website in the minimum time and to reach the desired page. It is the map of your whole site structure. 

• All necessary pages should be in the navigation like services and product pages
• Navigation names should be short and easy to understand
• Navigation should not be too much deeper. 
• All the pages should be categorized properly if you have a large website.
• Your Home button should be on the most left side as when the user goes back they use the home button 
• The contact button should be on the right side. 
• The most important categories should be on the top level. 

Have a look at the great navigation structure of POLITICO. The cool thing about its navigation is it covers the whole screen and doesn't get any visual distractions.

5. Use White Space:

Using white space makes the content more visible and understandable, especially for the larger content sections. But if we use unnecessary white spaces, it also badly impacts the UI/UX. 

According to crazy egg white spaces around the text increase the user's intention by 20%. 

It makes our website more professional, fresh and attractive. White space can be good for advertising. One effect of white space is that it takes space so if you want to show important text before the page scrolling then it might be due to white spaces you will need to scroll the page. 

Proper utilization of white space can greatly improve user experience. 

• Use white space after Headings.
• Use white space after the paragraph.
• Use white spaces in a consistent way, don't use them randomly.
• Remove extra white spaces.

Example:

Can anyone ignore Apple's UI design? Apple products are an art themselves and the use of white space makes them appear on the screen more. 

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6. USE Attractive Headings:

Heading makes your content more stand-able. Heading is also an important element to optimize the keywords for ranking. Most of the time the user doesn't read the full content, they just read the headings. Search engines also give headings more weight over the whole content. There are multiple levels of heading that fall between H1 to H6 according to topic's importance. 

So to make the heading stand out we should keep the following points in mind.

• Categories content in clusters with specific headings
• Use H1 only once on a page. 
• Use the focus keyword in H1 
• Make catchy & attractive headings
• Use H2 & H3 headings for further sub-topics

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7. Catchy Call to Action:

Call to action are the words/Buttons or links that convince the user to perform an action on the web page. CTA’s have a separate value in the marketing funnels. Convincing a customer is the most tricky part either in traditional or digital marketing. A call to action is really powerful and direct impact on conversions. There are different calls to action like “Get a free quote, Schedule a free call, Test for free, subscribe us, read more”

There can be a different call to action on the same page or the same call to action can be placed on every page. Like service-based businesses want to move their user to their contact page so they use “Contact us”

Call to action on every page. 

Moreover, a call to action helps the users to navigate further if the user will not know what to execute next he will not wait and might exit the page. So a proper call to action helps the user to perform our desired actions.

• Every page should have at least one call to action
• Use catchy call to action
• Use colored buttons as a CTA

Example:

Check this site “ The Budgetnista “ How they use an highly attractive and catchy call to action. 

8. Use original images: 

Nowadays customers are smarter enough, they are faster in judging a website before further exploring it. Images play an important role in it because they are easy to remember. If we use the stock images they don't really show the originality of the story. Stock photos look somehow fake and also many businesses are using them. The chances are high that the user already saw those images somewhere else. Which is not a good thing.

• Always use original images 
• Save all the images in a drive that is used on your website 
• Use the original images of your product or the team of your company because a professional original image is more trusted as compared to stock images.
• Use infographics instead of stock images 

9. The Importance of Bullet Points:

Bullet points help to summarize the key points of an article, a product or a service in a short time. Users can get an overview of what solution we are providing to their problems. It makes the content organized and attractive.

10. Make sure your site is responsive on all devices:

In this modern era, everyone has access to mobile devices and we can access information from anywhere. In the past, we only developed our websites for large devices (desktops) but now there are plenty of options in the market like tablets and mobiles with different screen sizes and features. 

Now our website should be responsive on all devices. Recently, Google started penalizing websites that are not mobile-friendly Google is really serious about the user experience of the websites. 

What can you do?

• Open your website on different screens 
• Check if your website layout is responsive on all the devices 
• Check the speed of the website on mobile devices 
• If some text or elements show bigger on a small screen fix them 
• The best practice is to design a separate mobile page 

Example: Dribble website is one of the best examples of responsive design it condenses from 5 columns for desktops and laptops to 2 column grid layout for mobiles and tablets. 

11. Use hyperlink differentiation:

When we use hyperlinks in the content it means we want the user to go to that link. 

“Its a standard practice and the user knows the blue color on the text is a link and they can click on it”

So we should not use different styling for hyperlinks, in this case, we should only follow the standard practice of a blue hyperlink because users know it well. 

12. Ask for minimal information:

We should collect minimum and precise information from the users in the first touch point. Because time is money and if a user has to fill in all the information on the website in detail it is not a good user experience. 

Example: Have a look at the contact form of TechStrive we only collect some necessary elements you will not find any additional fields in this form it almost takes less than 1 minute to fill out this form. 

Conclusion:

We have covered all the necessary elements to improve the website user experience. We hope it will help you to skyrocket the user experience of your website. If you need any further help to improve the website UX please consult with our web design experts in Berlin.