Your website’s user experience (UX) can’t be overlooked. Your audience needs to have a good time when visiting your site and engaging with your brand, so here’s our guide on how to improve your site’s UX.
Make navigation straightforward and intuitive
One of the most important aspects of a good UX is navigation. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to find your way around a site where you have to click through loads of unnecessary pages just to get to your destination, or where seemingly straightforward links send you somewhere else entirely.
Whether your site has e-commerce functionality or not, your site should be organised like a good store, with everything placed where you would logically expect it to be, with clear signage to help you get around.
Write content for your users, not search engines (but don’t forget them completely)
Engaging content can be tricky to write, and if you’ve been given reams of (typically outdated) advice about how to optimise your writing for search engines, you can often end up with something clunky that only the site crawlers want to read.
Instead, you should be writing your content for your users, about a topic that interests them, and in a tone that resonates with your target audience, not an algorithm. You need to make use of relevant key phrases, but don’t stuff them in. If your topic is in line with your target keywords and you’ve done your research, the keywords should flow naturally within your text.
Optimise for mobile users
More than half of internet users are browsing on mobile devices. That means, if your site isn’t optimised for mobile, then you could be effectively turning away over 50% of your audience.
To improve your UX for mobile users:
- Make more of your content scrollable, rather than having to click through to multiple pages.
- Make sure images are high quality, even when appearing on a smaller screen.
- Keep the paragraphs of your content shorter to make it easily digestible.
- Position your most important interactive elements, such as links, in the areas of the page that are within easy reach of the thumbs when holding a mobile device.
- Use larger buttons, links and text to accommodate for the smaller screen and make them easier to click.
- Consider using accelerated mobile pages (AMP).
Be consistent with your branding
Your branding isn’t just about creating an image for your business, it provides consistency and unity across all your platforms and provides a much better UX. Across all the pages of your website, all your social media channels, and any video content, your visual branding and tone should be consistent.
Your branding isn’t just about showing who you are, it’s also about how you want your audience to feel when they connect with your business. Whatever feelings you aim to evoke with your branding, your UX should make them feel the same way.
Keep your design clear and simple, free of clutter
A clean, simple design is sure to improve your UX, especially if your current design is too cluttered. A stripped-back, clean design with a clear colour scheme is much more enjoyable for your user and easier to navigate.
This is even more important when it comes to optimising your site for mobile users, as the space you’re working with is limited, and the small screen can easily become crowded and disorientating.
When you’re thinking about your UX, put yourself in your audience’s shoes, and ask yourself what kind of experience they would want to have when visiting your site and engaging with your brand, and then keep that same approach through your content on all your platforms.