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In a nutshell, the user experience (UX) is how someone feels when they interact with your website. A positive UX can lead to more conversions, higher engagement, and repeat visitors.
On the other hand, a negative UX can cause people to leave your site without taking any action, or even worse, leave a bad impression of your brand. In fact, one study even found that a poor UX design can be detrimental to a user’s health.
Fortunately, there are a few simple things you can do to improve the UX of your website, and we've outlined six of them below.
Prioritize web accessibility
Web accessibility should be top of your mind when thinking about your website's UX. After all, if people can't use your site, they're not going to be able to experience it properly.For those unfamiliar, web accessibility refers to the practice of making your website usable by people with disabilities. This includes everything from ensuring your site can be navigated using a keyboard to adding alternate text for images.
There are lots of resources available to help you make your site more accessible, but one place to start is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines provide detailed instructions on how to make your site accessible to people with various disabilities.
To find out how your site currently stands with regard to WCAG requirements, you can use accessiBe’s accessScan web accessibility checker to get a free and instant audit that will highlight any accessibility issues on your site across several key areas.
Simply enter your domain, and receive a downloadable, detailed audit that depicts where you are meeting accessibility requirements, and where you are not.
Keep things simple
When it comes to your website, less is almost always more. That means you should avoid adding any unnecessary elements that could clutter up your site and make it harder to navigate.Instead, focus on keeping things clean and easy to understand. Try and keep your website to a two or three-colour scheme, utilize an average of two fonts, and make sure all of your images are relevant and high-quality.
This will help improve the overall UX by making it easier for people to find what they're looking for and take the actions you want them to take.
Make use of white space
White space, otherwise known as negative space, is the area on your website that doesn't contain any content or images. And believe it or not, it can actually be a valuable tool for improving the UX when used effectively.
For example, white space can:
- Make your content easier to read
- Direct attention to specific elements on the page
- Create a sense of visual hierarchy
- Improve the overall aesthetics of your site
Improve page loading times
Page loading times are important for two reasons. First, people are generally impatient and if your pages take too long to load, they're likely to give up and leave. In fact, the probability of a bounce increases by 32% when page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.Second, Google considers page loading times when determining where to rank your site in the search results, so a slow site can impact your SEO. Fortunately, there are a few simple things you can do to improve your page loading times, including:
- Optimizing images
- Minimizing HTTP requests
- Enabling browser caching
- Reducing the size of your CSS and JavaScript files
Enhance mobile usability
Mobile use accounts for over 50% of all web traffic worldwide, so it's more essential than ever to make sure your site is mobile-friendly. If a user tries to access your content on a smartphone or tablet, and it's not optimized for mobile, they may experience things like zoomed-out pages, unreadable text, and links that are too close together to click.In addition, Google now uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor in the SERPs, so if your site isn't optimized for mobile, you're likely to lose out on some valuable traffic.
Fortunately, there are a few simple things you can do to improve the mobile experience on your site. For example, you can:
- Use a responsive design
- Optimize images
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Avoid using Flash
- Use a mobile-friendly theme or template
Ask for feedback
One of the best ways to improve the UX of your website is to simply ask people for feedback. After all, who better to tell you what needs to be improved than the people who are actually using your site?There are a number of ways to gather feedback, but one of the simplest is to just add a contact form to your site and ask people to get in touch if they have any suggestions or comments. You can also use surveys or polls to collect feedback directly from people as they're using your site.
If you are implementing a brand-new web design or introducing a new feature, you may want to consider conducting user testing. This is where you give people tasks to complete on your site and then observe how they interact with it. This can be a great way to identify any potential issues with your design before it goes live.
Final word
The user experience (UX) of your website has a direct impact on things like conversion rates, bounce rates, and even your SEO. So, if users are having a difficult time navigating your site or if it's not as visually appealing as it could be, now is the time to make some changes.Remember, even small improvements can make a big difference when it comes to your UX, so don't be afraid to experiment until you find what works best for your audience.
by Web Desk via Digital Information World
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