8 Ways To Improve The User Experience of Your Website

Your website, whether be it a blog, online shop or business site will always have an ultimate objective to achieve – strive for the goal of attracting users and getting them to stay on it. Here are a few ways you can improve your website so that users won’t be dissuaded from exploring more.

1. Easy Navigation

This is fairly basic and simple. No one likes a website where they have to jump hurdles and crawl through steps to get to what they want. Improving on this aspect will minimize the users stress level and in return significantly boost their experience while being on your site. Here are some of the ways.

Having shortcuts and hyperlinks to specific categories and pages on your website will typically be the norm and should be located at the very first page when users enter your site as to make sure they can get to where they want on your website quickly and effortlessly. Should be noted as well is that if your website happens to have a wide variety of pages with different subjects for all of them, consider making quick word categories for all of them, this will avoid the situation where a user has to scrawl through a wide list of pages just to find the one they want.

2. Keeping It Clean

Keeping the pages of your website clean and easy to read should be priority just as you would the rooms of your house. This usually means keeping anything that doesn’t relate to what is on the current page to the side and on a smaller scale while the subject of the page in clear view, which means avoiding bombarding a user with links to something not involving what they came for and instead letting them browse on their own pace.

On the similar subject of keeping your website clean, that should also include not running a tremendous amount of advertisements in all the empty spaces available to you, and cluttering your website as white spaces have been shown to improve the users general experience and make the subject of pages pop a lot more.

3. Call To Actions

Just as navigation is important for a user’s experience on your website, so are the Call To Actions (or CTA’s) involved within it. In simple definitions, a Call To Action is when a user is interested and wants to participate in whatever your website has to offer, the most common ones are Sign Up, Log In, Purchase, Proceed To Checkout and Download.

Following the examples of Navigation, you want your CTA’s to be easy to find and click on, and as such you should make them larger than your websites standard font size so they are not easy to miss or miss-clicked, this will ensure to snag a potential customer easily when they are interested as the longer they spend looking for how to participate means that the quicker their interest fades. This will in turn increase the chance of you losing a potential customer or user.

4. Consistency

This part covers the general importance of having consistency with your website, you should not have one part of your website be simple and minimalist and another extremely gaudy in comparison.

This means whatever you should so happen to choose to be your standard should stay your standard across the board such as fonts, general colors, font sizes and the composition of your website. It generally means the aesthetics of your website, the look and feel of it.

Consistency evokes familiarity and will avoid users feeling like they entered the Twilight Zone when they click from one page to another and decrease the probability of users feeling lost and confused.

5. Flow

Akin to comic books and graphic novels, flow is extremely important, when going through your website, your eyes should seamlessly go from one thing to another with little to no interruption.

Improving flow means that the placement of everything on your website should mesh well and not follow the example where your Purchase CTA be placed next to the Sign Out CTA.

Similar subjects should be grouped closer together while opposing subjects be moved with their own group.

Having good flow on your website avoids the problem of users getting confused when browsing it and instead can swiftly jump from one page to another with no moment where they have to search for what they want after reading something that piqued their interests.

6. Design And Look

By the standard, you want your website to look its best, and that it should be. Your website should be pleasing to the eye and the colors should match the subject of your website.

Avoid using bright neon colors as well as very dark ones, as the former will lead to pain in the eyes if viewed for a prolonged period of time and the latter makes users squint to see anything on the website.

As for design it should not need to look bombastic or outlandish in any way unless it mirrors the websites subject matter. Its design should instantly make a user snap to what you want them to know about your website, give them the essentials and leave the bigger details for them to click on and learn more about, users should not need to guess what your website is all about.

7. Positioning Your Website

This is a simple yet usually overlooked one, the positioning of your website is key if you want to attract your target audience, if people come to your website to know more about food and instead get a business insurance plan, they are not going to be thrilled.

So from the get go you want to set up your website where a user will know what he or she is getting into even before the person reads any of the nitty-gritty details, so you want to be upfront about your websites subject matter and make it clear and known what your website is and why you do what you do for the website.

8. Dead Ends

In general you absolutely want to avoid your users experiencing a dead end on your website, wherever they go they should always be able to move to somewhere from that page, you never want a page where the user can go nowhere but back, having a recommendation link at the bottom of a page is definitely a good thing as well as a number of links to various other things like a profile of you or links to where they can find more information about your website.

Avoiding a dead end is always beneficial and prevents users from feeling annoyed or confused when they happen to stumble into one, as you should always keep users on the move and never stagnant.