5 Effective Ways to Optimize Your Website’s User Experience

June 05, 2021

A smooth, fast-loading, easily navigable website is of the utmost importance for companies.

Because businesses face so much competition on the internet, it’s imperative that your site offers users a better experience than your competitors.

If your primary competition’s website looks like it was made in 2008, contains no multimedia, and offers only a telephone number by way of contact, you have an easy job.

Unfortunately, most websites are fully optimized to offer customers a great experience, as this is what makes sales — so you have to up your game.

Besides hiring an expert UX UI agency, there are things you can work on today to improve your site’s user experience (UX) and boost your conversions. See also UX company and find out more below!

1. Keep It Simple

If a new visitor to your site is immediately confronted with a full page of animations, clashing fonts, and rainbow colors… they’re probably going to get a migraine and bounce.

When designing your web pages, think clean, organized, and simple. Unless you’re an artist showing off all your best work in technicolor, your site visitors are likely looking for a solution to something rather than a show.

Keeping things simple allows you to highlight the important parts of your site and draw people’s eyes where they need to be looking.

2. Streamline Your Navigation

Your site map should be easy to navigate. For smaller sites, this is easy; for larger ones, it can be a mission.

For instance, it’s common for large fashion retailers to have one main navigation bar at the top separated by Men, Women, and Children. There’s then a drop-down menu for each category containing Coats, Dresses, Trousers, Shoes, etc. After that, customers can usually filter by size, color, fit, and more.

This makes much more sense than making Color one of your main categories on the website’s homepage. Think about the most important sections your customers will be looking for on your site, then break them down with further subcategories.

3. Add Some Interaction

We know we said that less is more, but engagement and interaction are also essential to ensure your visitors stick around.

A well-placed video, perhaps showing customers how to use a product or talking them through a service, is a good example of interactivity that will improve your sales and your customers’ user experience. Other types of interactive content include quizzes, charts, maps, infographics, polls, and calculators. If you plan to get with anything that’s more complex, you might consider thinking about hiring one of the top New York web design companies that can take care of all your interaction needs.

4. Improve Your Page Speed

Some forms of interactive content can unfortunately slow down your page load times. If they’re too slow, people will get bored with waiting and bounce to another site.

First, check your page speed with Google’s free tool. Then, you can work on compressing large images or removing what’s causing the lag.

Another way to speed up the loading time of your web pages is by utilizing a web proxy server. Through data caching, proxies will allow you to store content on the proxy server itself. So, whenever a user comes back to a page they’ve already visited before, it will instantly load.

5. Consistency Is Key

Making sure your fonts, heading sizes, color schemes, design elements, and layouts are consistent across your whole website might seem pedantic, but it’s vital.

If a visitor navigates to another page on your site that looks completely different to the one they just left — or even just slightly “off” — they might feel disoriented and wonder if they’re still on the right website. This causes them to lose trust in your site, and even worse, your business.

Keeping everything consistent and cohesive looks professional, polished, and crucially, trustworthy.

Bottom Line

It’s no longer good enough to simply offer an amazing product or service — your web presence needs to give customers an equally great experience.

Think of it as a physical store. If you walked into somewhere that was poorly lit, messy, and the staff ignored you, would you buy something? Probably not.

Just like a storefront, your site needs to be inviting, engaging, and looking legit. Pay your UX some attention today and see how your business benefits!