The Importance of User Experience on a Website
What is User Experience?
If you own or manage a business website, you may be aware of the term User Experience (UX). But, do you know what it actually means? And what is the overall importance of user experience on your website or app?
User experience is basically the way a person feels when using your website, and how they interact with your website. It encompasses everything within the website, such as speed, calls to action, images, fonts, white space, and colours. All these aspects add to the overall experience a visitor receives when they view your website.
User experience is important, not only for attracting visitors to your website, but also for keeping them engaged in your website, and converting them to returning, paying customers or clients.
The Importance of User Experience for Attracting Visitors
User experience has a massive impact on SEO, which of course, is essential for attracting visitors to your website. Google looks at a range of different user experience factors when indexing and ranking web pages. If your website has a bad UX design, with slow loading pages, and many usability issues, Google will rank those pages below those with good user experience design. It is for this reason that incorporating great user experience should be a priority for your website from the beginning of the web design process.
The Importance of User Experience for Conversion Rates
Have you ever had a really bad experience on a website due to usability issues, or things not loading properly? It is highly likely that this experience led you to exiting from the page and having no interest in purchasing their product or service.
Customer journeys within a website are very important for conversion rates. A customer is less likely to place their trust in a website if it appears unprofessional with many bugs and a poor layout. A paying client may lose interest in your service if your webpages are filled with large blocks of text and lacks attractive imagery.
How to Improve User Experience on Your website
You should always pay attention to user and customer experience from the inception of your website. There are many UX factors which should be taken into consideration at the development stage, and steps which can be taken to improve user experience on an existing website.
Usability Testing: Usability testing is a method which allows web owners to view user interactions on their website first-hand. This is an easy method to carry out and involves the web owner or designer asking an objective person to navigate through their website and discussing any usability issues they came across, or any features they think may improve the overall experience of using the website.
Website Appearance: Appearance is one of the most important factors of a website. No one enjoys trying to read text written in small font, or text on a background which makes your eyes ache. Put some thought into fonts and colour schemes as these are actually more important than you think. Make sure your text is easy to read and doesn’t give your audience a headache.
Ease of Use: How easy is it for users to navigate around your website? Your audience should be able to find the information they are looking for as easily and quickly as possible. Calls to actions, buttons, and features such as search bars and contact forms should greatly assist your users in finding the information or product details they require. It should also be optimised for use on mobile devices.
If you provide a lot of written information on your website, ensure this is written in a way which is easy for your audience to understand. Split long paragraphs into different sections, make use of bullet points, and write in way that your audience will find easy to understand.
Page Speed: Try to optimise the page speed of your website to ensure you do not lose potential customers due to slow loading laggy pages. Using a reliable, fast hosting provider, scanning your website regularly for issues, and ensuring all bugs are fixed on the site should help you to optimise the speed. You should also ensure that all media such as videos and images are optimised for use on websites as files which are too large can have a huge impact on page speed.
How Can Bark Street Digital Assist?
Bark Street Digital are a professional digital marketing agency based in Bolton. The web design and UX team incorporate user experience into every website they design. We can also look at your current website and identify changes to be made to improve user experience.
We provide an SEO auditing service which can assist with user experience by identifying issues which could have an impact on loading times.
Our Director, Stacey Owens, can be contacted via email at stacey@barkstreetdigital.co.uk or via telephone on 01204 263028.