With so many businesses trading online, having a website that works has never been more important. Whether you’re strictly online selling clothing or your website acts as an intermediary for your hairdressing business, ensuring that users can easily access what they need on your site is of the utmost importance. Many times, businesses neglect their website in exchange for social media or PPC; however, if the website that is attached to these is not easy to use for a potential customer, you could easily lose them. The way you can ensure that your website is easy to navigate for a successful business is through user experience.
User experience covers many things on your website, including speed, navigation and mobile design, which are increasingly important not just for user experience on your site but for things such as SEO, which affects how your website ranks on search engines.
So, if you want to improve your website and make it easier to use both for your users and for website rankings, here are 3 main things that you can change or improve so that your website runs smoothly. Continue reading to learn more.
Speed
Page speed is more important than you think when it comes to your website. Websites that are slow to load can not only frustrate users, but can affect your website’s SEO. When a website is slow to load, many users tend to bounce off the site from boredom and frustration, which not only loses you a potential customer but also reflects badly on your company as a whole.
To see what is slowing down your site, Google tools such as the website inspector can tell you what’s making your site slow, whether that be JavaScript or page size, and help you implement features, such as lazy loading, to get your site to work more quickly. When this is improved, this can help to boost SEO. Google ranks faster-loading websites higher, which can positively affect rankings and move your website further up the SERPs.
Navigation
Navigation is very important when it comes to improving user experience on your website. When a navigation is busy and complex, this can start to confuse users, which may result in them clicking off the website, which is the opposite of what you want. Instead, keep the menu short and clear, making it easy for users to find everything across your website, as well as using simple language such as home and contact for ultimate simplicity.
In addition to this, you should also make sure that each one of your pages can be found in the navigation, as well as keeping important pages in the footer. This not only helps with navigation for users but also helps Google crawl the website.
Mobile Design
Making sure that your website is suitable for mobile is one of the most important things to think about when you’re building your website these days. We’ve all been on a website on our phones that is practically unusable, with buttons too small and only half of the page visible. This demonstrates the importance of creating a website made for mobile, as users need to be able to utilise your website while on the go. This is specifically important for those businesses that are service-based, such as restaurants or HGV training courses, which people will need to access while they are out.
Overall, mobile design will continue to be very significant not only to users but also for SEO purposes, as Google will rank websites that do not work well on mobile lower.