5 Tips To Improve User Experience On Your Website

Let’s say you’re a business owner with a wonderful product or service and you want to make sure your services are available to be researched/bought/consumed online. Naturally, the first step would be to buy a domain and make your website. After extensive research, you find the perfect website building tool, spend countless hours making it perfect, hit the big “GO LIVE” button, and find that your website traffic isn’t as high as you would like it to be, even with a decent marketing investment.

While there could be a number of factors at play here, an often overlooked area of improvement is the user experience of your website. Think about it: how many times have you been on a website that took FOREVER to load, causing you to leave the page or website? How about that one time you just wanted to talk with SOMEBODY from the company’s website you were on but couldn’t find a good contact page?

I understand your frustrations… And I want to help! Here’s a quick list of 5 ways to improve the user experience of your website.

Consider How Your Audience Consumes Content On Your Website

Not all businesses are the same, so why would all websites be created the same? A website that works for a company selling eco-friendly, metal straws probably won’t work for a company offering local dog-walking services. You need to consider how your customer spends time on your website and why they would be on your website in the first place.

For example, are people wanting to buy your product or service online or do they prefer to just research about it? It’s been shown that about 81% of shoppers research a product online before they make their purchase. That means that if you don’t have the proper content on your website, customers may get turned off with what you have to offer since they can’t even do proper research about it. Your website (and all marketing efforts for that matter) should consider where the viewer is at all stages within the marketing funnel.

Less Is More – In More Than One Way

I’m a big proponent on the “less is more” philosophy. Too much information can cause over stimulation, research fatigue, and it’s just not how we consume content in our culture today. We want quick, easy to digest information that tells us clearly and concisely how/why a product is something we need to have.

Another way to use the “less is more” approach for your website is in terms of added features and behind the scenes code that may be negatively affecting page load times. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have the essentials like certain marketing pixels and page markup, but it’s easy to go down the slope of turning on all of the “extras” that come with popular website builders. Just remember to exercise restraint when it comes to adding a bunch of unnecessary code to your website.

Navigating Your Website Shouldn’t Require A Map & Machete

Here’s one that I’ve seen quite often. I know it’s tempting to want to show every page you have to every single person who visits your website. After all, you spent hours working on them! What usually ends up happening, though, is that viewers will become confused and end up leaving your website frustrated with the jumble of pages to sort through. To help with this, organize your navigation tabs appropriately and don’t have too much clutter on one page (especially the home page). Make sure your website doesn’t have a ton of tabs for the viewer to traverse and try focusing on the top three to five pages that are of most benefit to your customer.

I once heard somebody say, “if everything is important, then nothing is important.” Yes, you want to make sure you let your potential customers know about what’s going on at your business, but don’t scare them off with content that’s 50 page-scrolls long.

Open The Doors Of Communication

A visitor wants to contact you because they’re interested in hiring your company… GREAT! The only problem is that they don’t know how to get a hold of you because there’s neither a “contact us” page, nor is your address or phone number anywhere to be found on the website.

It’s not enough to just put your phone number and address on your website, though, because you can’t account for when a potential customer will want to contact you. Letting your customers contact you directly opens the doors of trust and opens that connection between them and your business. Simple additions to your website, such as adding a click to call button for mobile or Google Maps integration, can significantly increase the likelihood that your viewers will contact or visit your business.

If your website doesn’t support the use of forms, consider posting an email address (one that you actually check) or links to your social media as an alternative. The important thing is that they’re able to get a hold of you!

Help Foster The Paths Of Conversion

I’ll admit, this last tip is mostly a benefit for you as a business owner. A beautiful perk of marketing online is the increased ability to associate actions with dollars due to increased transparency. With the help of conversion pixels and clear paths of conversion (add to cart, purchase, contact us, download, etc.), you’re able to use your customers’ browsing journey to better determine your return on ad spend/return on investment. As an added bonus, you’ll also be able to segment audiences across the array of digital platforms you’re advertising on such as Facebook and Google Ads.

If That Seems Like A Lot… We Can Help!

It’s easy to get bogged down with creating a website from scratch. What’s probably even more daunting is overhauling your current website to give it a more modern look. Once you’ve actually put the time into creating the perfect website and hit the “launch” button, finding the time to maintain the website is a task all within itself.

We at J Miller Marketing can help ease your website design woes! We have an experienced team of designers who are more than happy to create a professional website tailored to your exact business needs.

Interested in learning more about J Miller? Check out some of our other blogs, browse work, or just drop us a line!