A lot of information about making online sales focuses on gaining more traffic and getting more backlinks. These are both critical components of online commerce, but so too is a user-friendly website interface. Regardless of how much traffic your site receives, if people are having a tough time using or navigating it, your efforts to get them there will be for naught. Use these strategies to build better customer experiences and create a better user experience for all your visitors.
Navigation
Navigation is all about how visitors move around your site, which is why you create an intuitive interface that is easy to use. As soon as your visitors feel frustrated because they can’t find something, they won’t hang around for long. Check out these pre-designed visuals as a rough guide to see what attracts user eyeballs and retains their attention.
Your site menu should make it easy to understand how you have organized the information, and where each link will take them. For example, a clothing site would have different categories of clothes. Each different category would have links to each type of clothing in a subcategory. Customers should always know where you are sending them, and just as importantly, how they can get back to the beginning.
Scannable Content
Visitors won’t read your site like a book. Instead, they will quickly scan the pages to locate the information they need. Create headlines, announcements, and products to accommodate this type of research. You might just find that your customer experience will drastically improve. According to a Nielsen Norman Group study, only around 16% of visitors will read every word of an article, and seventy-nine percent of people will rapidly scan your content. Keep your text readable and easy to understand. Avoid jargon and only use language that people use every day.
Create A Clean Uncluttered Layout
Today’s web design is all about large areas of white space and high-quality visuals. Use attractive images to break up your text. If you cannot create your own, then stock image libraries like 123RF make it easy and affordable to collect all the images you need. Professional-level editing is also possible for free when you use sites like Canva, PicMonkey, and Pixlr to design attractive graphics. Above all, avoid creating a cluttered, flashy website that looks like it escaped from the 1990s.
The Importance of Speed
Did you know that if your site takes longer than 2.5 seconds to load, your visitor has most likely already hit the back button and returned to the search page? Use tools that monitor your site’s download speed from different locations around the country or world.
Not only will you know how responsive your website interface is, but you will also be shown where the bottlenecks are and given tips on how to remove them. Site speed is heavily dependent on your web hosting. And cheaper hosting usually means a significant sacrifice in speed that isn’t worth the savings. Google prefers sites with faster load times and uses this metric to determine search engine rankings.
Every improvement you make to your website interface will equate to a better experience for your visitors. This in turn will improve your search engine rankings, bring in more traffic, and increase conversions.