The game doesn’t end when the customer gets to your website. In fact, it’s just beginning.
This is when we start to think about UX: The User Experience: how customers perceive your website when they visit it and how this affects what they think and do. Too few business owners ask themselves how they can improve the experience for their users when they get to their website. A good UX can be the deciding factor between your site making a sale, signup, or never seeing the visitor again.
Here are 5 tips for you on how you can attract users to your website.
Everyone visits a website for a reason: perhaps they are looking for information or looking to buy a present for a friend. Your website should be structured to meet these needs. E-commerce websites must make it easy for customers to get to all products from the homepage in less than three clicks. All of the key information for sales conversions should be placed in menus at the top of a website.
Anything that isn't crucial for sales conversions and reducing churn rate, (the stuff for curious customers such as terms and conditions, jobs, etc) should be placed in the bottom menu of a website. This will reduce clutter on the homepage and ensure that customers looking to buy from your site can always find what they are looking for. Nothing is more important in site design than helping visitors to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible, because if they don’t they will go somewhere else.
Doing this won’t just help your sales conversions, it will also improve your site’s rankings on search engines. If customers can find what they want from your website quicker, they will enjoy the experience of visiting your website more, and this will lead to them spending more time on it and less of them leaving quickly. This will improve your bounce rates which will improve your website’s search engine rankings.
It’s not just about what you put in your user menus it is also the types of menus that you use. Make sure that drop-down menus don’t have too many levels and that they work well on smartphones too.
Often a simpler menu with less moving elements does a better job than one that looks impressive but can be a hassle for visitors to use. Remember no user ever complains about a website's menus being too easy to use, so resist the temptation to show off and keep it simple. Before your site is built you should have a site plan including a plan of how the menus work. Taking the time to do this, even just with a pencil and paper, will help you avoid simple site menu planning problems. If you are interested in online versions you can check out these digital examples of site plans
Getting Stephen Spielberg to direct a long video intro for your website won't help your conversion rates if customers have to watch this video intro instead of finding what they are looking for much quicker. Having a visually appealing website is a great way to make a good first impression, but doing this isn't about rolling out the red carpet, it’s about giving the visitor exactly what they are looking for as soon as possible.
Make sure the design of your website always supports your sales and marketing goals and objectives and doesn’t distract from them. Perhaps the best way to show our products is with stylish photos and videos but make sure that menu buttons to product pages and buy now buttons are always nearby.
Pagespeed is an important technical factor in itself but it is also a fundamental dimension of UX. In the early days of dialup, users were patient enough to wait a long time just to see a picture of Darf Vader, but these days 53% of mobile site visitors will go somewhere else if a website takes longer than three seconds to load.
Slow Pagespeed is bad for everyone. Even the big brands find it hard to keep customers on their site if they have a slow Pagespeed. Digital Marketing icon Neil Patel recently quoted a study that found every extra second of loading time cost Amazon 1% of its revenue.
A great place to start for anyone interested in testing their site’s Pagespeed and checking Google tips and policy on it is Google Pagespeed Insights
If your website Pagespeed is too slow the first key areas you should look into is the size and format of your site's content, especially videos and photos. Often site owners can boost their Pagespeed by reducing the size. It's important to remember that Pagespeed can affect desktop and smartphone users in different ways. So you may also want to look into plugins that help with these problems. You can read more about Pagespeed here
A big part of getting customers to buy from your site for the first time is building trust.
Many small businesses create additional information and contact channels to do this, including FAQs, telephone, e-mail, contact forms and social media. The distribution of these channels and where their information appears should also be a key consideration for your UX team. Make sure these channels are easy to find, ideally within the customer's eye line, when they are making important purchasing decisions.
For example, placing customer service chat bubbles, calls to action for calling, on product or signup pages will make sure your customer team has the maximum chance of being contacted to resolve any customer concerns or doubts that would otherwise prevent sales.
Thank you for reading this article from rankingCoach. We hope these 5 UX tips help your business to be more successful online!