by Haris Quintana
Once you have set your website up and you sit and navigate through it. You are likely very proud of what you have accomplished - and so you should be. Creating a website that is both functional and beautiful is no easy feat. But there is a critical component that you need to consider at all stages, and even if you think you’re done - you probably aren’t.
Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash
In web design, you are looking to make your website as easy as possible for users to navigate around. If you have products that you are selling online, they need to be able to get there quickly and easily. If you are giving away eBooks and downloads your sign up process should be a snap. You SEO should already be tackled by now, but if you are still asking ‘what is SEO marketing?’, then read up and implement as you need.
So here are a few ways that your website could be more user-friendly.
Fast Load
Your load time is going to make a difference to if people are going to have around or leave. Most people are willing to wait up to 6 seconds for your website to load, but after that, they will likely lose interest and exit. There are a few particularly heavy plugins, as are many images that haven’t been reduced. You should look through your content and see what might be slowing it down. There is a tool called Pingdom that can give you a good idea of your website speed, and you can use Google’s website speed improvement tools to help you speed up the load time.
Navigation
Just because you know your way around your website doesn’t mean that someone else will. Try to minimize the number of options on the menu. There is often a paradox of choice provided by the website, and it all becomes so much your user might simply feel overwhelmed. So clean up your navigation and make it easy to tap or click on any device.
Format
Make your content as easy to digest as possible. When people arrive on your site, they are looking for specific information usually. So you need to ensure that they can get to that information with as little fuss as possible.
Making sure that you have your content well-formatted with the use of headings, bullet points, and even contents at the top are going to allow people to get what they need. Break up the texts with some images.
Mobile
If your website isn’t as smooth on mobile as it is on a desktop, then you are losing more customers and readers than you might like to think about. There is a range of things you can do here, but the main one would be to head to Google’s mobile tester and work through the checklist of tips.
Your website is one of the first things people are going to see. When people are looking for a company, the first thing they do is google it. So make sure you are doing everything you can to retain readers, make the conversions, and check out 508 guidelines for even more accessibility tips.
