In today’s highly digital world, every business needs a website to stay competitive. A website ensures that your target customers can find you online with ease. It also enables you to market your service or product offerings to a broader audience.
However, having a website alone doesn’t guarantee a high customer conversion rate for your business. You’ll need to ensure your business website is developed with the user in mind to achieve this.
If you’re looking to improve the experience that visitors have with your website, here are five steps to building a user-friendly website:
Pick A Visually Appealing Template
The first thing that visitors note on a website is the design. You can create a user-friendly website by picking a design layout that’s familiar to your users. A good example is the standard two- or three-column layout.
Having a single column on either side of the page gives your website a professional and consistent overall look. The other critical aspect you’ll need to pay attention to is the user interface. To make your interface user-friendly, adopt your brand colours and ensure your site’s background colours are in harmony with the font type on your text.
Creating a balance between your font type and colour scheme ensures that your web content is legible to anyone visiting the website. If you’re a small business owner, and you happen to live in Liverpool, check out online sources like https://kitching.ltd/web-design-liverpool to find the help you need in designing a visually appealing website.
Boost Your Site’s Loading Speed
You can make your website user-friendly by increasing loading speeds. One of the reasons why sites experience high bounce rates is slow loading speeds. Your visitors don’t want to wait for minutes for your website to load.
There are several things you can do to boost your website’s opening speed. These include compressing your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files. Avoid using large images; instead, compress them for the web to make them open faster online. Also, reduce page redirects.
Remember that every time a web page redirects to another one, your visitor will have to wait an additional time for the request and response cycle to complete. Better still, host your website on a dedicated server as opposed to a shared server. It’d help to audit your server for performance bottlenecks that could be slowing its loading speed.
The duration that your server takes to respond affects the amount of traffic that your website receives. Some issues that could be affecting server response speeds include inadequate memory, slow routing, and slow database queries. Work on fixing these until you have a response time that’s below 200ms.
Provide A Search Function
You can boost your site’s user-friendliness by including a search bar. This is critical for companies that have a significant information inventory on their sites. Visitors appreciate websites with a search function that enables them to find the content they want quickly.
The search bar comes in handy for visitors who can’t quickly locate what they want or can’t use the navigation system to locate it. This saves them the time they’d have spent browsing through web pages. The best place to put a search bar is in the upper right-hand corner of every page.
When designing the search function for your website, ensure that it displays zero results when users search for information that’s not available. Ignoring this can mislead visitors with inaccurate results, giving them unpleasant experiences.
Make Site Navigation Intuitive
Seamless navigation is among the key attributes of a user-friendly website. To give your visitors a good browsing experience, plan your site’s navigation well and logically. You can do this by clarifying the pages to place on your site and their hierarchy. The best way to establish order is to determine which pages would be most valuable for your visitors.
Once you’re clear about this, prioritize primary navigation pages on your site. Furthermore, enhance your site’s user-friendliness by making navigation intuitive. Intuitive navigation requires you to apply conventions that make your website appear and behave the way users expect.
Consider creating a navigation menu that’s clear, straightforward, and concise. If you’re looking to use multiple links, opt for a mega menu or a drop-down menu. This allows users to find what they want on your website with ease.
Provide Multiple Communication Channels
Adding contact information to your website gives visitors the confidence that a business is real. Most companies include a physical address on their websites to enable potential customers to locate them with ease.
However, to allow for seamless communication between users and your business, consider giving users the convenience of using multiple channels to interact with your business. You can do this by diversifying communication channels to include contact forms, live chat, and email, among others.
Final Thoughts
Making your website user-friendly is the first step to converting visitors into buying customers. Poorly designed websites give users negative browsing experiences that cause them to leave without interacting with your product or service offerings. If you’re looking to build a user-friendly website for your business, follow the five steps outlined above.
Abhay is a Digital Marketing Guru and an accomplished entrepreneur with an experience of a decade working with various businesses varying from startups to established brands. He co-founded many companies like Logicsofts, PrintYo, CrazyRise and more. He is passionate about SEO and Online Data Analytics, which plays a vital role in any business to grow and mutate as per the data results.
Follow me on LinkedIn,Facebook and Instagram
