When it comes to your website it’s easy to get lost in the game. We often find ourselves trying to boost our domain authority, increase our visitors and make ourselves more attractive to search engines such as Google.
But it’s important not to lose sight of why we have a website in the first place…
...to get more customers.
With this in mind, it can be beneficial to focus less on the numbers and more on delivering a website that engages those who matter to our business. After all, 10 delighted website visitors who convert to being life-long customers is infinitely more beneficial to your business than 1000 visitors who stay on your site for 15 seconds before disappearing.
In this guide, we'll walk you through 10 quick and easy UX changes you can make to your website to earn more attention and convert more customers.
What is UX?
What do we mean when we talk about UX?
U - User
X - eXperience
Once you understand the unusual acronym, the rest falls into place. Your website UX is what your visitors experience when they type in your address and hit enter.
Good UX will delight your customers by making their lives easy. Bad UX will frustrate your customers and lead them to consider throwing the keyboard at the screen. Focusing on creating a better UX is simply the act of making changes to your website that make the experience better for those that use it.
Why bother? Because a good UX means more profit.
One recent study showed that strategically improving your user experience has the potential to increase conversion rates by up to 400%.
Here are 10 quick and simple tips for improving your website UX.
1. Introduce more white space
Including white space on your website might seem a little counterintuitive. Why would you want to waste valuable screen time with blank space?
It isn’t the white space itself that is a powerful tool to improve UX, but what that white space says about the rest of the content on your site.
To illustrate this, imagine your company logo in the middle of a piece of paper. It clearly stands out and is impossible to miss. But if you put 100 other logos on that paper, suddenly it would take you a few seconds to even identify your own logo.
By using white space on your website you make the information you do communicate clear and easy to digest. Psychologically you are also highlighting that the content is important and deserves its own space.
Try working through your website and removing any content which isn't necessary to your messaging, replacing it with white space.
2. Develop clear calls to action
What do you want people to do when they visit your website?
Give you a call? Buy something? Fill out a form?
Even the best-designed website in the world will be inefficient if it doesn't make clear what a visitor should do next.
Take for example a great landing page that explains all the benefits and features of your product. The visitor reads it all and they are just about ready to buy, but there is no clear call to action on what to do. They get frustrated and leave the site without completing a purchase.
An example of a page with a good call to action is the one used by Apple for their iPhone 12. Check out how there is lots of useful information which can be scrolled through, but what never changes as you scroll is the small ‘Buy’ call to action in the corner.
Your call to action doesn't have to be long and complex, but it does need to be present and clear on what it’s asking visitors to do.
3. Increase page speed
Speed is everything in the age of the internet.
If your website is slow you are likely losing customers before you even get a chance to impress them. People expect quick loading and will simply click away if a page is taking too long - and the bounce rate increases the longer the delay. This is what Google estimates for mobile:
Conversions are of course affected. According to Google, for every second delay in mobile page load, conversions can fall by up to 20%.
Use Google’s free tools to test speed and get suggestions about which areas need improvements and concrete steps to take. If your website isn't as speedy as it should be, implement these changes or talk to your webmaster about making improvements.
4. Create better headlines
A very quick and simple way to improve your user experience is to create better, more engaging headlines. Every headline on your website is an opportunity to provide your audience with the information they need to become a customer.
Audit your current headlines and edit any which are not clear and compelling.
5. Improve page navigation
Your website should be a hub of information for your customers, either educating them about your products or helping them find a solution to challenges that are closely associated with your niche.
Knowing that your users are on your site to find something specific makes it clear why your navigation should be clear, simple, and easy to use. This is especially true on larger pages that contain lots of content.
Try adding content lists to longer pages, highlighting and linking to the information within. This will help people quickly find what they are looking for and ensure they don’t go elsewhere to meet their needs.
6. Highlight key information
Another way you can help website visitors find what they are looking for is by making the most important information on each page easier to identify and digest. You could do this in many ways including:
- Using bullet points
- Creating infographics
- Bold or underline key points in longer sections of text
- Use white space to make key information stand out
7. Choose images wisely
Your website images serve several purposes when it comes to UX. Firstly, they should act to break up the text included on your site and visually engage your visitors. Secondly, your images should help add context to your website and the information contained within it.
For example, including images of your products being used is a good way to add context to users on how they work.
Update any images to ensure they are of a high quality and add real value to your site.
8. Insert your brand
If a customer knows your brand, then they should be able to identify your website without seeing your logo or name.
Applying your brand to your site will help maintain consistency both throughout the website and with other marketing materials used on other platforms such as printed brochures and social media. This can include using the same fonts, tone of voice, style of imagery, and colors.
Department store John Lewis have a very memorable brand with a distinctive font and look (with plenty of white space) which is constant throughout their website, both product and other pages.
9. Check your links
Over time, as websites change and update, links become broken. This means that a link that may have taken you through to additional useful information before, now just takes you through to an error page.
Ensuring your links are not broken is one of those many tasks which benefit both your UX and search engine rankings.
Use a broken link tool like Screaming Frog to check any internal or external links on your site that may be broken and work your way through updating or removing them.
10. Consider your users through buyer personas
When it comes to user experience, your user is the key to success. So, when making updates always consider how well those updates are going to serve your user and their needs.
One simple and effective way to do this is to create a detailed buyer persona. You can then use this persona to check all your changes against, asking yourself ‘will this be useful to them?’.
Better UX, better websites
Your website is a tool that should help you generate leads and educate your customers on your products, services, and your niche as a whole. Taking the time to make a few updates to your user experience can make that tool work much better for you, ultimately helping you generate more profit with less effort.
