You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and that’s why it is vital that your website provides the best possible user experience.

The days when it was enough for a business to simply have a website are long gone. Your customers will expect a good user experience as standard; when surveyed, 88% of users said that a bad user experience on a website would stop them coming back again.

If you’re wondering how to improve user experience on your website, but don’t know where to start, we can help. In this article, we’ll share our top digital marketing tips to help make your website user friendly.

The benefits of good user experience

Creating a flawless user experience will help convince customers to choose your business over competitors, and ensure that they come back time and time again.

Enhancing this can benefit your business in a number of ways, from a higher search ranking, to more visitors to your website and increased revenue. A study published in Forbes magazine found that a website that is fully optimised for user experience resulted in a 400% increase in conversion rates.

Thankfully, you don’t have to be a whizz at website building to create a great user experience. Even making some small changes can drastically improve the user experience, and ensure that your website is the best possible ambassador for your business.

How to improve user experience on your website

1. Do your research 

No matter your business, the goal of optimising user experience is likely to be the same: you want users to engage with your website and have a positive experience, turning browsers into buyers. Some fixes, such as improving load time, may be obvious, but in order to create the best possible online experience for your customers, you need to do research into your target audience.

Tools such as Google Analytics can help you to understand what pages are most popular on your website, and get an insight into how users move around your site. You should also talk to your audiences if possible, and take a look at competitor’s websites to compare how their user experience measures up to your site.

A great way of testing whether changes to your site are a help or a hindrance is through A/B testing, where you create two different versions of your website and see which one fares better with your users.

2. Keep it simple 

When potential customers visit your website, they don’t want to be bombarded with large amounts of information that feel confusing or irrelevant.

Having plenty of white space on your website gives your design room to breathe, and taking a ‘less is more’ approach means that the user’s eye is drawn to the information that is actually relevant. Remember that most people who are visiting websites will be skim reading, so opt for bullet points and text broken down with headings instead of large blocks of text.

Consistency is one of the most fundamental principles for website building. An inconsistent website will also suggest to users that your brand is confused about what it stands for. If the font, colour and design is not consistent throughout the pages of your website, you risk users getting frustrated and clicking off.

3. Make navigation easy 

Did you know that 50% of potential sales on websites are lost because users can’t find the information that they need? As a business owner, it’s your job to ensure that your website is simple to navigate, and helps users find what they need, rather than being a hindrance.

When it comes to website building, we don’t always get it right the first time. Google Analytics can be a great help for identifying possible places on your website where users get ‘stuck’. You can help users move through your website easily by highlighting links, making sure you have a search bar that works properly, and ensuring that headings accurately reflect the information on the page.

4. Focus on content 

Having engaging and interesting content on your website is a key part of good user experience. Although users don’t want to be bombarded with information, there is a fine line between simple and boring – you also want your site to be interesting and tell a story about your brand.

Some ways to add content to your website without it feeling cluttered could include a dedicated section for blogs, using video, or linking to your social media pages. To learn more about content marketing and how our team of expert marketers can help, click here.

5. Optimise user experience for mobile 

More than 50% of the online traffic in the world now comes from mobile users, so ensuring your website is user-friendly on multiple devices is one of the most important things you can do to improve user experience.

Google also announced that mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor, meaning that ensuring a good user experience on mobile can directly affect your SEO ranking. To learn more about how user experience affects SEO, and our top digital marketing tips, you can read our blog here.

The value of good user experience

If you’re wondering how to market your business online, optimising user experience is a great place to start. Although this article has covered user experience for websites, user experience actually concerns every interaction that a user has with your business, online and off.

Over the past 7 years, we have worked with hundreds of clients to create excellent user experiences for their customers through our range of services including SEO and content marketing and website consultancy. Whatever your business’s needs, our digital marketing experts are on hand to help you transform your marketing strategy.

We also provide regular industry insight and digital marketing tips and tricks through our blog. To find out more about how we can help, get in touch today.